


waiting for the winter

by coldhope



Series: The Second Law [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Past Brainwashing, Past Torture, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-01-25 18:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 64,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1658123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A month or so after the revelation of Hydra's infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the self-immolation of the Helicarriers, pieces of debris are still being fished out of the Potomac; hearings are continuing on Capitol Hill; and the future of international intelligence is still very much up in the air. And, desperate and sick, trapped halfway between conscious identity and conditioning, what's left of Hydra's wetwork asset wants to come in from the cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Eventual Steve/Bucky. The Avengers & ensemble cast will show up.

_He's a world away from mother now_  
 _In this land of smoke and steel_  
 _He lies listening for another sound_  
 _And he's eaten his last meal_

_And he knows that winter is coming_  
 _And he knows he won't survive_  
 _But he's tired of endless running_  
 _He won't hide..._

_And he's waiting for the winter_  
 _Waiting for the winter_  


\--Tony Carey

~

Steve Rogers can't sleep. 

He is one of two people currently walking the skin of this world peculiarly, perfectly suited to addressing the gravestone of a friend while that living friend stands beside him. The sharp lines of the words cut into Fury's headstone have not had ninety years to fade and blur, but he knows what they will look like when they do. He can see it, overlaid on the new-cut marble. He can see Peggy vivid and intense, her mouth scarlet and generous and curved, like a ghost over the dying Peggy's face. He can see two ages and neither of them have the slightest understanding of mercy. 

He can't sleep because every time he does find himself slipping under it is only a matter of time before he is back in the vertiginous hell of the falling Helicarrier, the stink of ozone and burned metal all around him, his right side a mass of cold fire, fighting the Winter Soldier. Fighting _Bucky_. Again the past and present lense into one another, he's dangling over another lethal drop, reaching desperately for a hand that slips away from him; and in the present, he lets go. The shield falls away like a toy, inconsequential. _I won't fight you._

In the dream Bucky's eyes meet his, and know him, and their cold pours through his bones. _You let me fall_ , says James Buchanan Barnes, and every time, Steve wakes up drenched in sweat, hands shaking. 

_You let me fall_.

_I'm with you to the end of the line._

He has no memory of the fall into the Potomac, no memory of a hand materializing out of the ringing gloom to haul him back to the surface, back to life, back to air. No memory of being hauled ashore and deposited without ceremony on the beach. Until he woke in the hospital, the last thing he was aware of was the bitter-ice crack of his cheekbone breaking under the Winter Soldier's fist, the almost euphoric sense of relief, of _giving up_. He had nothing left, no more strength, no more options. _Do it. Finish it. I'm with you to the end of the line._

He was so tired, and it had been so long a life. 

Steve can't tell if it's better, the way the dream ends. If it's better that Bucky knew him and remembered who he was, even if that memory was horrible. Part of him was still frozen in that moment when the rail had snapped and he couldn't reach Bucky in time, couldn't save him, couldn't stop it happening. Part of him would always be caught there, in the endless grind of time. Was it better that way than the reality, that the Winter Soldier had just decided it was close enough for government work and slipped away to save himself after beating Captain America senseless?

He doesn't know, and he paces through his darkened apartment, fresh scars angry pink across his side and his face. Steve Rogers is terrible at lying, always has been, and it doesn't matter that he's lying to himself these days. He can't tell anyone about this--who would he tell?--and it's only now, in the slow nights, that he lets himself think about the third option. He does not know if he wants to believe what he thinks he saw, falling away from awareness like a stone into dark water: that fist drawn back pausing, those eyes suddenly focusing _on_ him instead of through him, that implacable shell showing a crack. 

Because hope is not a blessing. Hope is, and always has been, cruel. 

~

The arm hurts him all the time now. 

He is aware of this the way a man might be aware that it is raining, or that the collar of his shirt is too stiffly starched and rubbing against his neck. Pain has long since ceased to offer any motivational force; he registers the dull ache and the sudden hot stings as something in there makes an intermittent connection, files it away to include in a status report, if one is ever called for. It's not just the arm, either. The way five of his ribs on the right side flare with pain each time he draws a breath has also been registered, as have countless bruises and lacerations, now healing. Slow. It has been a very long time since he has had to heal without the needles and the chair.

He wants the chair. His memory is a series of afterimages interspersed with the haze of thawing, but between the brightness of the outside world (wind on his face, touching his exposed forehead, the odd intangible heat of sunlight) and the dizzy fog he's so used to, the chair had been there. It was shaped to his body, and when the restraints closed around him and held him fast, something about that pressure all around him seemed to activate some deep, deep subroutine left over from a previous program, something that mimicked relaxation. The chair always meant pain, of course, and the headstorms that meant the beginning of a wipe, but it was _familiar_. He wants that now, that sense of being held and contained, no longer in charge of his body. 

The ribs make it hard to breathe. This does not bother him except when he has to do anything that drives up his heart rate and demands increased oxygen. He has noted this, and made adjustments accordingly.

The day he had first visited the Smithsonian--through the back, because metal detectors and the Winter Soldier are not friends--the enormity of what he saw made it easy to dismiss. James Buchanan Barnes was dead, had been dead for decades. Another dead man in a museum full of dead men's achievements. Nothing to do with him. 

He hadn't really understood the compulsion that kept him coming back, though. Each week, almost, he found another way into the Air & Space, stood reading the words of the display over and over again until they were graven into his memory. Steve Rogers' best friend. A life outlined in points of time. A childhood, a war. An end. He understood wars and endings. He _didn't_ understand how looking at the dead man's face in the display felt like a dim frozen mirror. Because he had been trained out of introspection he did not recognize in his own mind the awareness that he already knew the answer.

Snapshots: he's in the vault, on the chair, unsettled and on edge. Pierce is there. He says words the Winter Soldier can't hear through the vacuum between here and reality. Vaguely he can see Pierce's lips move, but until a backhand blow snaps his head to the side, the insulation stays patent.

Reconnected, he turns his face back to Pierce. _The man on the bridge. Who was he?_

_You met him earlier this week on another assignment._

He is sick-pale, puking-pale under the remains of the antiglare black smeared round his eyes, under the damp-dark hair hanging in lank clumps. He looks through Pierce, through the wall of the vault, through decades. His gaze is glassy black. Only a thin ring of ice-blue is visible around the vast holes of his pupils. 

_I knew him._ It's quiet, puzzled by his own certainty.

Pierce tells him he's about to change the world. Again. That his work--his _work_ , that's funny--has shaped the century. That things are at a tipping point, and Pierce needs him to do his duty one more time. 

_But I knew him_ , says the Winter Soldier, and his mouth tightens for a moment, lost and confused. Pierce stands, giving up on the pep talk. 

_Prep him._

_He's been out of cryo-freeze too long_ , one of the whitecoats says. 

_Then wipe him and start over._

He does not protest as they push him back into the chair's embrace, opens his mouth for the bite-guard, still looking at something the rest of them can't see with those black shark's eyes. It is only when the restraints close round his arms and the headpiece rotates to close round his skull that he seems to come back into his body at all, and then it is just to scream and scream and scream.

At the moment he is mechanically shoveling food into his mouth. The can says _GIANT(tm) Brand Bite Size Beef Ravioli_. He stole a box full of these cans from a truck, at some point in the recent past. The can had a pull-tab on top the way pop cans do. He thinks that's new, that cans didn't always have pull-tabs, but he can't think why this observation is worth the processing time required to note it. The cold squashy lumps inside have no particular flavor. That's familiar, at least. His handlers had fed him similarly tasteless meals when he'd been out of the tank and working long enough to require fuel. 

When the can is empty he sets it aside and leans back against the ratty mattress that forms the basis of his nest. He is tired all the time now, despite the food, and he is aware that his chest and arm and side ache, but he does not want to sleep. Sleep--uncontrolled, unmonitored, without the chair to bring him out of it--is terrifying, because he sees things that are not really there. Without the chair he is only aware of what he thinks is real, and when his senses tell him conflicting information, that reality slips a little further each time. 

The thing about cryo is that it works fast, so fast ice crystals do not have time to form within the tissues and burst them, leaving the subject a soggy mass of protoplasm; but unlike ordinary freezing, which toward the end can feel almost warm and comfortable, this means it hurts. It hurts every time, and he remembers that through the wipes, because it is not a memory of thought or action. It hurts so badly that he wants to scream, but the sub-zero cold of what's left of the atmosphere in the chamber paralyzes his lungs and throat, and a moment later everything's faded through grey into black as his eyes go still and solid. Time does not pass for him in this state. There is only the astonishing, terrible pain of freezing, and then dim indistinct light and the equally terrible pain beginning at fingers and toes and running up his limbs as he is thawed. He cannot speak for several minutes after the process has begun, but he is capable of dull, thick moaning sounds, and sometimes the dizziness makes him choke and heave with nausea although there is never anything to bring up. This state lasts for anywhere between seven and fifteen minutes by his internal count. 

Only now it's going on and on, the sickening vertigo as fluid in his semicircular canals changes state from solid to liquid, and he's not in the chair, he's not in the _chair_ , where is he, what's gone wrong, and all around him through the blur of thawing vitreous humor is bright harsh color, red and white and blue. He reaches for weapons that are not there, lips pulled back from his teeth in a frozen snarl, programming pulling at him in a dozen different directions at once, and out of the swirling starry smear filling his vision a hand appears and wraps around his forearm, and a voice is echoing, foghorning, slowed down out of all sense: _I've got you, Bucky. I won't let you fall. I'm with you._

He thrashes awake in the blanket-nest in the boarded-up house in the mortal city, whooping for breath in awful tearing gasps that make him cough and send fireworks through the fractured ribs down his right side, because he knows that voice as well as he knows his own--better, perhaps--and more than anything in the world he wants to hear it again. 

"Till...the end of the line," Bucky Barnes rasps, alone and freezing, out of time and out of place.


	2. Chapter 2

_and for those who still lie hidden_  
 _he's afraid he can't provide_  
 _and he hopes they will forgive him_  
 _by and by..._

_and he's waiting for the winter_  
 _waiting for the winter_

\--Tony Carey

 

They can't call it S.H.I.E.L.D. any more. Steve thinks sometimes that no acronym in the history of ever had been quite so contrived--and part of him is glad the name went down with the Helicarriers, rotted out from the inside. Carrying his own vibranium shield had felt like cheerleading without saying a word, and the days when Captain America had been a cheerleader were firmly on the far side of seventy years of ice. 

Hill and Coulson are still trying to come up with a catchy replacement name for whatever the remaining organization will end up becoming. Because there's still a need for it, nobody can argue with that, but things will never again be so simple as _us against them_ : the last clinging shreds of that unquestioning trust are gone. 

Steve has read about the things done by the CIA while he slept under the ice. If they'd had access to the kind of technology Hydra had been playing with, he has absolutely no doubt that the men behind MKULTRA would have used it. The serum that had made him into Captain America had never successfully been replicated--never _completely_ successfully, he amends--but reading between the lines of some of the declassified MKULTRA and MKDELTA files, he thinks he can identify efforts in that direction.  


(The Freedom of Information Act strikes him as both necessary and--based on what he knows of the modern world--profoundly improbable.)

Stark never misses a single chance to call him geriatric, and most of the time he laughs it off--ha-ha, that Tony, such a card--but sometimes, generally around four in the morning when he can't bear the thought of the dream starting up again, Steve _feels_ every minute of ninety-odd. He's at loose ends, and that's never sat well with him. Without missions, without a job to do, he finds himself thinking too damn much. 

He's still in DC. There hadn't been anywhere else he particularly felt like going. The offer of a floor on Stark's re-erected tower was still open, but quite frankly Steve would move into Stark's place only if he had no other choice available. He respects the man's undeniable genius, his bravery, his remarkable capacity for solving problems by hurling handfuls of cash in their direction, but housemate material Stark is not. Also, he can't get used to JARVIS. Talking to somebody without a visual point of reference always gives Steve the willies: he needs to know where people are, in case they happen to be behind him with a gun. 

Having Sam around makes the awkward loose-ends feeling slightly less galling. They jog-- _on your left!_ \--and Sam makes breakfast afterward and for just a little while Steve stops having to not mind everything that happened. For a little while he can be just exactly as damaged as he feels on the inside, and knows Sam understands completely. 

Sometimes smiling makes his face ache. 

There are still some places in the city that take away the constant crawling edge of anxiety, and the Air and Space is one of them. He avoids the bits with him in, always in nondescript clothes and a cap pulled down over his forehead, averting his gaze from the huge expensive Howling Commandos exhibit, and spends his time in the parts of the museum dedicated to the space race and the moon landing. That had been so difficult to fit his head around, when he'd woken up. Man had actually landed on the moon, walked around up there, driven a small car. These days nobody seemed to care a great deal, but every time Steve looked up at the face of the full moon and knew bleached-white American flags were still standing somewhere on that distant surface, pride rose in him. Thinking of the sheer toe-curling bravery of these men riding rockets into the blackness with no guarantee they would ever return--just for a little while he is able to forget some of the betrayal and disillusionment. Just for a little while. Familiar to him now as his own apartment, the Skylab exhibit with its rings of spherical pressure tanks, the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo capsules, the golden Mylar-swathed spiderlegs of the preserved LM2, offer Steve a sort of secular stations-of-the-cross.

He has a routine for this weekly visit. The museum in the morning, before it gets super-crowded, and then lunch at one of the places in the old post office pavilion; and then he walks, miles and miles of concrete and tarmac under his sneakers, passing through the city without being recognized, another anonymous passer-by. He walks to tire himself out, to try and bring on sleep without dreams. It doesn't work, but the simple experience of existing without anybody remarking on the fact is...pleasant. He has in fact gotten really good at not being noticed, which is why he immediately registers it when somebody _stares_ at him. 

Steve feels it like a searchlight passing over and suddenly focusing, and turns at once to scan the crowd. The feeling of being watched snaps off immediately--and then turns back on as soon as he stops looking. 

He can feel his instincts coming online one by one like an old tube radio warming up, slow at first, then quicker and quicker. Casually he wanders toward the acrylic-encased Apollo 11 capsule on display, raises a curious hand to touch the plastic protecting the scorched heatshield, looking at the reflection of the people behind him. There. Sweats as nondescript as his own, a hoodie, worn baseball cap with the brim curled, hiding the face. He drifts round the edge of the display, totally focused on the tiny cramped space where three men had once sat for a small but historical space of time. The guy in the hoodie hasn't stopped watching him, intently focused. 

All the hairs on the back of his neck stand up at once. Okay. First thing to do is take this somewhere less crowded, in case Hoodie has anything dramatic in mind. Hands in his pockets, he wanders away from the Apollo exhibit, down the hall away from the majority of the crowd, feeling the stranger's gaze like a pair of laser sights between his shoulderblades. The lack of his shield's reassuring weight is very, very noticeable as Steve pauses to bend over a drinking-fountain and let Hoodie come closer, and as he straightens up and turns around--and looks right into a pair of eyes he would have recognized anywhere in the universe. 

" _Bucky?_ "

He has a confused impression of a pale, sweaty face behind a rough growth of beard, bruised smudges of shadow pooled within the sharp rims of eyesockets, the unmistakable sour reek of unwashed skin. Mostly what he sees are those wide blue eyes. The last time he'd looked into them had been through a haze of blood as the Winter Soldier methodically got on with beating him to death. Now they fix on his--and Steve sees recognition in there, just before the pupils flare wide and what is left of his old friend freezes. "Bucky," he says again, "it's okay--" and even he can hear the lie in his voice. It doesn't matter. The second time Steve says that name, something behind the hugely dilated eyes slams down like a panic-room door, and a moment later the Winter Soldier stumbles backward, shaking his head in silent negation, half-trips, turns, and flees. 

Steve realizes he is gripping the steel of the water-fountain hard enough to leave finger-dents. His first instinct is to pound after him, tackle Bucky to the floor and demand answers, but two things stop him: one, there's no guarantee whatsoever that Bucky would be able to give them, even if Steve catches up, and two, he had looked _terrified_. That isn't a look he is terribly keen to see again.

Oh, and three, it'd make a hell of a scene. More of one than Buck has already made, of course. Steve can hear shouts and the hiss of security walkie-talkie static. 

He makes himself take a few deep breaths, reaching for calm, reaching for his just-another-guy lack of expression, but it's difficult. Just in the few moments he'd had to observe, Steve had registered how Bucky was favoring his right side, how _sick_ he'd looked--cheekbones standing out like spars under that rough-stubbled skin, no color in his face at all other than the bright eyes and the smudges of shadow surrounding them. No, he won't run. 

He'll walk _fast_.

~

Flickers of memory are coming back to him, like pallid bits of something dead and drowned drifting to the surface. The response that had sent him running clicks off almost audibly once he's out of the building, and that's convenient because he isn't actually sure he can _do_ much more running at the moment: his right side is on fire and he can't take a deep breath. Dizziness washes over him and for a moment he is sure he's going to vomit, but he grimly holds on to the handful of stale crackers he'd forced down this morning, leaning on a bench, and counts in Russian

_(when exactly had he learned Russian?--no, that's not a thought he can think right now, that's not on the list of Okay Subjects)_

and wiggles his toes inside his dilapidated sneakers until the spinning goes away. He is dimly aware that people are giving him a wide berth, but not because he looks suspicious so much as that he doesn't: just another homeless drunk.

Rogers recognized him. Of that there could be absolutely no doubt. Rogers--Steve--had recognized him, and called him by his old name, and just for a moment before the conditioning slammed back into place he had wanted so much, so much, to just cross the last few feet between them and give up, let Steve be the one to carry everything, just for a little while.

He can't lie to himself, because that isn't a thing the chair taught him to do. What it taught him to do was to work based on a specific and highly limited number of inputs. There was never any dishonesty in the programming: if you looked at each instruction dissected out from the overall strategy, they all stood out undeniable and verifiable. It was just the way in which they were placed together which made them gently twist the world to fit into place. And without the chair he has had to try and make do, these past weeks, this month, almost two months, with no guidance whatsoever, and it _hurts_. It _hurts_ , trying to think, after so long on ice and under someone else's trigger finger.

He doesn't know who he is supposed to be now. He knows what he has been. Thinking seems to be getting even harder, and he can't eat, can't successfully keep much down, his metal arm hurts with a maddening insistent inconstant buzz of sensation, breathing feels like altitude climbs with a full rock pack, he's... _failing_ and he doesn't know _why_ and the cold shock of Rogers' clear eyes looking into his had been clean, bracing, he'd wanted so badly just to stop trying and give up. But the chair had been there still, the chair or something behind it had grabbed hold of his hindbrain and tugged, and he had turned and run. 

_(when you can't run you crawl, and when you can't crawl, when you can't do that, you find someone to carry you)_

What is left of James Barnes pulls itself together, the heavy clumsy weight of his semi-functional left arm wrapping round his right side to try and steady his grating ribcage, and looks for a hole to hide in. 

**

Crowds bother him, too, now, but Steve is finding with increasing glumness that practically everything bothers him--it's far worse than it was coming out of the ice in the first place, because back then he'd still had the brave-new-world thing going on; back then he hadn't seen giant flying alien mechaslugs devastate Manhattan, or watched a god with what he thinks Natasha calls _daddy issues_ tell a street full of people that they were created to kneel. He thinks he may possibly have run out of wonder, which is somehow terribly sad.

He compartmentalizes. 

From the museum guards' radio chatter he'd been able to find out that the running man had apparently headed south on 7th Street. Steve is no medic, but from the way Bucky's breathing had sounded even just for that one frozen moment, he doesn't think he's going to be able to run all that far. There aren't any alleys to hide in within an all-that-far radius. What there is is the teeming subterranean anthill of L'Enfant Plaza station, chaotic at the best of times and horrific at rush hour, all the traffic from four lines of the Metro subway flowing through it like blood through a concrete heart. If he needed somewhere to hide in a hurry, it's where he would go. 

He isn't even aware that he feels more like himself than he has done in weeks, heading for the station at a fast but casual jog. 

~

Sam Wilson has a day job. It doesn't involve flying around on jet-powered wings, beating the tar out of Nazi-flavored secret agents, or blowing up government property, but it's just as important and offers less collateral damage. It just never stops. 

When he isn't listening to his clients, fellow vets who came back from overseas having left their ability to sleep soundly and without nightmares behind them on the battlefield, he's listening to his friends; and when he isn't doing that he's listening to himself. 

He's just out the door on his way to lunch when his phone rings. Rogers. The friend he listens to most often. 

"Sup?" he inquires. There's the echoey clatter and roar of background voices on the other end. 

"Uh, you remember when everyone we knew was trying to kill me and Natasha?" Rogers asks. "And you made us breakfast instead?"

"Whole _hours_ sometimes go by when it doesn't cross my mind at all, man."

"Yyyeah. I may need another favor."

"Who's shootin' at you?"

"Nobody," says Rogers, and then hastily clarifies "right now, anyway. I could use a ride, though. Kinda got a friend here who's not doing so great."

Sam stares at the phone, an eyebrow climbing his forehead. Rogers is given to understatement. "What...no, you know what, never mind. Where are you?"

"L'Enfant metro station." He sounds distracted, and someone nearby on his end of the line is mumbling in what doesn't sound like English. "I wouldn't ask, but walking's a problem right now."

Oh-kay, thinks Sam. What the hell, today was shaping up to be boring anyhow. "On my way," he tells Rogers. 

Twenty minutes later he is shaking his damn head. "Oh _hell_ no, no fuckin' _way_ are you for real, man, how have you not just called Coulson and got a cleanup squad to come pick this guy up? He nearly _killed_ you, Steve! I was there!"

Also, he smells like a dumpster. Rogers has the Hobo Soldier's arm hooked over his shoulder; Sam has to admit that right now he doesn't look like he's up to punching anybody repeatedly in the head on Hydra's behalf. What he can see of the guy's face is kind of a shiny pale grey, and his breathing sounds pretty gross. And they're starting to attract attention. 

"Please," Rogers says, and he's doing that stupid earnest dimple thing Sam's 90% sure he doesn't actually do on purpose. "Just get us out of here."

Sam groans and thunks his forehead on the wheel. "Goddamn," he says. "Fine, but if he pukes on my upholstery your ass is paying for it, Cap." He hits the button to unlock the back door. 

"Understood." 

~

For all the time he's spent staring out these same windows in the slow hours before dawn, Steve has never actually considered what he'd do if he did find Bucky. Hasn't even really admitted to himself that looking for him is the underlying motivation for a lot of the things he's been doing these past weeks. He's never been good at dwelling on things, fretting over them, going over and over the details of a plan in his mind before a mission: his approach is more straightforward. 

His hunch had been right, like his hunches often are. He'd found Bucky slumped in the shelter of an alcove, attracting no more attention than any other street person--soon enough the station cops would have come round and tried to turf him out of his hiding place, and Steve thanks providence he got there before they did, for everybody's sake. He'd tuned out all the gnawing anxious instincts telling him he was in danger and just knelt down beside Bucky, reaching out to touch his shoulder, half-expecting the metal hand to close round his wrist. Under his hand, even through the layers of his clothing, Steve could feel the sick heat coming off him, and when he gave Bucky a gentle shake there was a nasty click-sizzle noise from the left sleeve of his hoodie, a sound like electrical contacts slipping open. 

Steve said a word under his breath which he'd learned from Natasha and shook him again, a little harder. Bucky's head wobbled, but he seemed to rouse a little, opening his eyes and looking up at Steve. There was hazy confusion in those eyes, blank and blue. "Buck," he said, under the noise of the station. "Bucky, c'mon, gotta get you out of here."

The eyes closed, reopened, slid into focus, catching the light oddly, and he saw recognition there again. Bucky's lips, cracked and bloodless, parted to shape a word.

"Yeah," Steve told him, hands steady on his mismatched shoulders. "Yeah, it's me."

As it turned out he didn't have to pay for any repairs to Sam's upholstery. The drive over to his apartment had been thoroughly anticlimactic, and Sam had dropped them off with a promise not to run directly to Coulson and Hill and tell on him, which he appreciated. It wasn't until he'd gotten a mostly-unconscious Bucky upstairs and deposited him on the couch and stood back that he was completely aware of the enormity of the situation, and how utterly he lacked any idea of what to do next. 

His first instinct had been to get the filthy clothes off, see how bad the arm was and what was going on with Bucky's ribs, but Steve had stopped himself. He didn't know how much of the Winter Soldier was left in control, and even if it was all Bucky Barnes he'd obviously been exploring the wonders of mind control for some time now. Having someone strip him and poke and prod without his conscious consent was probably not gonna sit well. Steve just propped him up on pillows and spread a blanket over him, dumpster-smell and all, and waited for him to wake. 

When he does, hours later, hours after the sun has set, it's terrible. Steve has never seen himself come out of the nightmares, doesn't recognize the flailing and thrashing as familiar. He just drops the book he's been trying to read and hurries over. Bucky's coughing and he knows that has to hurt, a nasty thick ineffective sound that takes Steve right back to his own childhood. "Easy," he says, getting an arm behind his shoulders. "I got you, it's okay, man, just breathe."

The baseball cap comes off in his struggles and lank greasy hair spills over Steve's arm. Bucky's trying to say something and he really wishes he knew Russian, or that Nat were there. Actually, yes, he really _really_ wishes Nat were there because not only does she know Russian but she also knows everything else, and right now Steve is so far out of his depth he can't see the bottom. He rubs firmly between Bucky's shoulderblades, which seems to help a bit, and in another minute he stops coughing and just droops against Steve's arm, fever-hot. "I got you," Steve says again. "You're gonna be fine."

Bucky is struggling for the right words, the effort visible and obvious. He tries a couple times before anything intelligible in English comes out. "The man...on the bridge. It was you."

He nods. He can see himself reflected in Bucky's eyes, too bright, a tiny dark silhouette against the room's light. "I remembered," Bucky breathes. "I remembered you."

Steve has read the file. He knows what they did to him, or at least what they did to him and admitted to in documentation. He had to throw up the first time he read all the way through it, and then he made himself do it again, made himself take in the words, register the entire catalogue of horrors. They must have wiped him after the fight on the bridge, they had to have done. "I forgot...again," Bucky says. "The chair. It...it hurts, Steve."

Whatever it was that had slammed down behind his eyes in the museum seems, miraculously, to be turned off for the moment. "It's over," he tells Bucky. "They're never gonna touch you again. That's _over_ , you're safe now. I won't let anyone hurt you."

The eyes close, long lashes clumped into damp points resting on his cheek, and, incredibly, Bucky smiles. "Feel like shit," he murmurs.

"You don't actually smell all that daisy fresh, I have to admit," Steve says, only just keeping his voice steady with considerable effort. It feels as if something bright and warm inside his chest is expanding out of all control. "Think you can handle a bath?"

Bucky nods, eyes still closed. The skin of his eyelids is so delicate it's translucent, showing the darkness of the eyes beneath. Steve is conscious of an overwhelming, illogical urge to brush each closed eye very gently with his lips.  


~

The bath is almost a disaster. Steve hadn't thought of the similarity between a bathtub and a cryo tank until Bucky started hyperventilating, and it took nearly ten minutes for the reaction to pass--but it _did_ pass. Eventually, with a trash bag taped over the metal arm, he settled into the hot water and let Steve wash him. 

Clean and dressed in a spare pair of Steve's PJs, his hair drying softly into brown feathers several shades lighter now that the grime is gone, Bucky looks desperately young--and very far from well. Steve leaves him sleeping in the actual bed and paces through the apartment, listening to a phone ring in Manhattan. He is almost sure he's going to get the answering machine when a dry voice picks up mid-ring. "What's my favorite Capsicle doing up this time of night?"

"I have an engineering problem," Steve says, and can picture Stark's eyebrow, and doesn't give a shit. 

"Go ahead," says Stark. "But keep in mind a lot of things these days can be fixed by turning them off and on again."

Steve lets this pass by. "Is this line secure?"

There's the faintest of clicks. "It is now." He can hear actual interest in the voice. 

"Okay. The name of my engineering problem is _the Winter Soldier's glitchy metal arm_."

Silence, then, softly, "Ho-lee shit. You know, with anybody else I'd ask if you were fucking with me, but it's _you_ , Rogers, so I'm just gonna say 'how many people know about this' instead."

"You, me, and Sam Wilson. Is Banner there? Because I need a doctor as well as an engineer." Bucky's ribs are a mess and the way his breathing sounds is ominously familiar to Steve from God knows how many episodes of walking pneumonia, plus it's obvious the arm is hurting him. 

Now Stark sounds excited enough to be jumping up and down on a couch. "And I was just saying to Pepper that if something interesting doesn't start happening round here I'd be forced to take up extreme backgammon just to keep myself from going nuts. --Hey, Pep!" he calls to someone on the other end. "We're gettin' the band back together!"


	3. Chapter 3

_He was born here in this city_  
 _He thought he knew these people well_  
 _'Till the one who shows no pity_  
 _Took the world under his spell_

\--Tony Carey

 

"Oh, no. Oh, no no no no no. No. Sixteen artisanal flavors of no."

"Pep, c'mon, it's practically Good Works." Tony's perched on the back of the sofa, grinning that particular grin that means he's going to happen to somebody. "Like if there was still a S.H.I.E.L.D. this would totally count as a call to arms. Also, it's Rogers. I'm not actually sure it's possible _not_ to do good when assisting Rogers. It's like a Lawful Good with Big-Ass Shield that Should Not Boomerang But Does, Despite The Laws Of Physics thing."

"That got away from you there," Pepper says, sighing and tucking a strand of hair behind one soigné ear. "Fine. But if Rogers brings that...individual...here and there is damage to Stark Industries property as a direct result, do not for one second think I will overlook it in the annual financial report."

"I should expect no less, Ms. Potts. Now c'mon, help me and Bruce get set up with whiskey and cookies to work out a plan for what the hell we're going to do with him. Or figure out something to say to cheer up Captain America when he gets here, he definitely sounded like an anachronism in tights that was having a sad."

"'Yes, we'll help you harbor your fugitive assassin'," Pepper says, and rolls her eyes; but since Extremis her approach to determining what things are and are not acceptable has subtly broadened. 

~

"Okay, so, from practically-legendary merciless superhuman assassin with a metal arm to sad hobo with a metal arm in, what, two months? I mean, sure, living in DC takes its toll on people, but sheesh." Tony leans back in his chair. "Make that sad _psychotic_ hobo." The marks of metal fingers on his throat are blooming black-purple, and he's not going to get his voice all the way back to normal for some days yet. 

Barnes' scan results are hanging in the air in front of him in luminous blue: a ghostly composite image of a torso with one artificial shoulder and arm. They're a mess. The dull haze in the computer-generated lungs corresponds to bilateral pneumonia in the lower lobes; right-side ribs six through ten show fractures, the broken ends of a few obviously grinding together. That he's breathing at all kind of impresses Tony, to be honest, let alone in good enough shape to be mooching round the streets of the nation's capital making a nuisance of himself. 

Tony is manipulating the display with both hands, enlarging sections with a quick flick of his fingers, turning the entire projection round to get a closer look at another angle. "Jesus. Did they put this in with a backhoe? Look what it's done to his spine--actually, wait, come to think of it, why hasn't it done _more_ to his spine, hauling around that much weight on one side? No, I guess being mostly kept on ice since the forties would kind of limit your skeletal development." He zooms in closer on the area where the prosthetic's base is anchored into bone. "Oh, for--You ever see that _Top Gear_ episode with the communist cars? This right here? This is _communist orthopedic surgery._ "

"Done without anesthesia," says Natasha, standing beside him, one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair. "The file says they took off what was left of the arm while he was awake."

"I could do a better job than this with gardening tools," he's continuing, and then stops, his fingers stilling in midair. Barnes' transparent torso goes on rotating slowly as Tony looks up at her. "...Anesthetics not in the five-year plan, I'm guessing? Running-dog capitalist chloroform not allowed?"

Natasha doesn't change her expression, which means he's crossed a line. He looks away again, mouth tightening. "Just. Jesus fucking Christ. How didn't he die of shock? Or, hey, of falling into a goddamn ravine in the first place, which frankly should be much more of a thing than it apparently is?"

"Read the file," Natasha says. "It's not all in there, I know it's not, but what it does say is definitely enough to be getting on with."

"Yeah, I'll pass for right now." He taps the fingers of one hand repetitively on the console: displacement activity. "How am I supposed to get a good look at that horrific arm of his if he typically reacts to people examining it with picking them up by their necks and throwing them across the room, that's the question."

"Let Steve talk to him before you try again," she says. "Right now the only person in the world he trusts even a little is Steve Rogers. Literally everybody else is a threat, and he's not guaranteed to respond well even to Steve if something triggers the conditioning." 

Barnes' enhancement factor, whatever it was, had kept him on his feet where an ordinary human would have succumbed to the pneumonia long before, but it made the task of sedating him stupidly tricky. Bruce is still tabulating bloodwork results. The cocktail of weirdness circulating through Barnes' veins is impressive even by _his_ standards. He'd started antibiotic therapy and poured fluids into Barnes, once he was out cold and not in a position to do any more neck-grabbing, but both he and Tony knew that treating his physical condition was pretty much guaranteed to involve almost every single trigger the guy could possibly have. Stuff on his face. Stuff in his veins. People doing uncomfortable and sometimes painful things to him and insisting it was for his benefit. If they couldn't get Barnes' trust, this was going to be something close to impossible.

Luckily, huge practically-insurmountable challenges just happen to be Tony Stark's favorite thing in all the world. After Pepper, and awesome cars, and robots, and the suit, and flying in the suit, and single-malt, and hey, right, those weird little pastries from that one place in Brooklyn. But huge practically-insurmountable challenges are definitely near the top of his list.

~

He doesn't know where he is. 

Opening his eyes on an expanse of white brightly-lit ceiling, he tries to remember where he is supposed to be, but it's like reaching into a hole full of shards of glass, it hurts too much to try very hard. Instead, the awareness that he doesn't know where he is holds steady in his consciousness for a moment, two moments, before tipping over the edge and starting the cascade of reactions. He gasps in a breath like knives in his chest and frantically struggles upright--he's somewhere bright and unfamiliar and _number of hostiles unknown_ and _input parameters unspecified_ and _mission mission mission mission mission_ where are his weapons where are his _weapons_ why can't he _breathe_ what's on his face what's in his arm no no no _no NO_...

Running footsteps, and a blur of movement, and _he's under attack ENGAGE_ the Winter Soldier swings a frantic punch in the attacker's direction, feels his fist connect, feels the warm hardness of bone under skin, hears the grunt--

\--and then something wraps around him and restrains him, something is holding him firmly, and the same dim instinctive reaction that had made him relax in the chair takes over. Almost at once an alarmed rapid high-pitched beeping noise nearby begins to slow down. He blinks hard, trying to focus. It still hurts to breathe, but his breaths are coming slower and deeper. 

He's being pressed against an odd hard-yielding warm surface, and a steady _lubdup_ sound seems to wash all through him, sluicing away the sour adrenaline. There's a smell, too, so familiar but maddeningly unplaceable, a faint hint of soap and something else, something warmer under that. Somewhere in his mind a steckerboard plug slides into its jack: a connection made.

"Steve," the name comes up, unscrambled. 

"I'm here," and he can feel as well as hear the words, his cheek resting against Steve Rogers' chest. He waits for the cascade to start again, but all that happens is a bubble of memory bursting: another world, the sharp planes and angles of bone under his hands, a too-thin boy leaning exhaustedly against him. Then it's gone. 

"Where...?" Bucky tries. "Not...your house." He doesn't question the fact that Steve is still holding him, because if he doesn't point this out maybe it will go on happening.

"No. You, uh. You're in kinda rough shape, Buck. I brought you somewhere safe where you can get some medical care."

_medical care_

_medical care_ he'd heard them talking at some point while he was coming out of the headstorm of a wipe, _we really ought to call it something else, the phrase is misleading_.

_Corrective maintenance. Concurrent with recalibration of the asset,_ and he'd gone away again for a little while, but some cross-connection had taken place somewhere in his head. _Medical care._

The oxygen cannula hooked under his nose registers. The bandage round his chest, stabilizing his ribs, registers. The stiff-taped patch on his organic forearm, where an IV catheter enters a vein, registers. The beeping of the heart monitor and the blank unmerciful fluorescent light and the smell of disinfectant--it comes faster and faster now, each individual observation heightening the one before in a huge exponential flare. Another cascade.

The stiffening is almost like the mindless muscle surge that comes with electric shock, all over, his eyes focusing at infinity, mydriasis flaring the pupils to huge holes into the darkness of his head. Dimly he is aware that Steve is saying things to him, that the pressure of his body is different, that he has moved. That _he_ is being moved. He can't speak, can't respond, can't even hear the words around him. He is being pulled in two directions at once, two responses fighting for control of what's left of his body and mind: sheer sickening visceral fear of the things that were done in places like this 

_medical care_

and the helpless just-as-sickening need for the chair and the things it told him and the way it took away the need to try to think. The chair made all the questions go away. All the uncertainty of observation and attempts at reasoning, all the individual independent _I think this, I do that_ presets, stopped when he was in the chair. If they were doing things to him with needles in bright rooms that stunk of antiseptic then _that meant he was back with them and he could have the chair again_.

Animal terror and stupid helpless need roar at him as he stays frozen inside the prison of his body, staring into nothingness, biting his lip so hard blood wells and runs warm down his chin. The heart monitor's beeps are so close together now they sound like a shrill scream. Breathing is impossible. The edges of his blurry vision are developing dark, bruised blotches.

And something soft and warm touches his forehead. He can feel it through every panic response that is holding him frozen because of its sheer unfamiliarity. Then hands are cupped to his face, thumbs stroking his cheekbones, and the touch comes again, so soft and totally unignorable. He feels tears spill over, hot-cold lines down his face, and another face eclipses the light of the room, clear blue eyes look into his. Again the slow tide of calm fills him up little by little, and he is able to see the room and the things in the room and know that they could not hurt him while Steve was there. 

He sags, and the movement lights up his right side with pain which he now has some spare attention to recognize. Huh. Yeah, that kind of did feel like it needed fixing, since it hadn't gone away on its own yet. And there was definitely something not right in his chest. 

Steve's right eye is...swollen, he thinks, pink with the beginnings of bruising, and remembers striking out in panic and feeling his fist connect. Misery threatens to rise in his throat and choke him, and Steve must see it in his face because he just strokes the sweat-sodden hair away and leans in to kiss his forehead, firmly, again. 

Lips are so soft, he thinks, astounded. Had he known that before, and forgotten it?

~

"I seriously do not know what to say," Tony Stark announces, not looking away from the display showing the current status of the infirmary's occupants. Barnes lies in a loose curl on his left side, settled into the answering curl of Rogers' body, his dark head tucked under Rogers' chin. The metal hand lies half-open, scuffed and dented but still entirely capable of turning human tissue into jelly: its fingers are slightly curled, relaxed. Rogers has an arm wrapped round him. Both of them appear to be deeply, profoundly asleep.

"Who are you," Barton asks, "and what have you done with Stark?"

"Laugh it up, Katniss. I'm honestly torn between straight-up aesthetic admiration and the need to take pictures to make sure we know this moment is a thing that happened." Stark shakes his head, staring. "Also, I need to point out that the Red Scare there looks _fucking adorable_ being the little spoon. And now that I've thought that out loud, I need to consider my life and my choices and where exactly it was I went wrong."

"Want help?"

"Thank you, no, I'm capable of unaided introspection. Must be all these degrees I've got lying around. If you're gonna take up space, Barton, make yourself useful and go round up the fellers, I ordered lunch and it'll be here any minute."

"Did you get shawarma? You totally got shawarma, didn't you." Clint hops nimbly down off the countertop he's been perching on. "I thought that was only for special world-saving occasions."

"It's probably escaped you that this heartwarming little scene could totally be taken, on some level, as a special world-saving occasion. And it's pizza, Mr. Jumping Off Rooftops To Conclusions."

"You just have a sincere moment, Stark?" Clint asks. "Damn, you totally did just have a sincere moment. I saw that. Right there. --Hey, JARVIS, you got that on tape, right? Nailed it. Wilson owes me twenty bucks."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise actual plot will show up next time.

_and he knows that winter is coming_  
 _as it's always come before_

\--Tony Carey

 

Bruce comes into the lounge, rubbing tiredly at his eyes. Tony is lying on the couch with his head in Pepper's lap: both of them are glued to their respective tablets, but look up when he enters. Not for the first time he thinks how remarkably suited to one another these people are. 

"How's he doing?" 

"Not great," Bruce says. "It'd be easier if he didn't have a panic attack every time he wakes up. There seem to be some short-term memory issues. Rogers has now explained to him at least five times that I am not going to cut off any more bits or shoot him full of excruciating cryoprotectants, but it's not sticking."

Pepper makes a small sympathetic noise. "But he _is_ going to be okay, right?"

"His lungs are in pretty bad shape." Bruce flops into a chair, taking off his glasses. "He's begun responding to the antibiotics, though, which is good news, and at least we know he's capable of briefly holding a rational conversation even if he does have to have Rogers stuck to him the whole time. I'm going to give it a little longer before I try introducing physiotherapy, for obvious reasons."

"Did Rogers happen to offer any clues as to what he plans to do with him once he's not doing his best garret-dwelling Raskolnikov imitation all over my infirmary?" Tony asks. "I mean, it's just about possible Hydra's going to want him back at some point, although they might have to play rock-paper-scissors with Coulson to determine who gets dibs."

"Rogers did not. I get the feeling he's not thinking in strategic terms at the moment. It's unrealistic to imagine that Coulson hasn't got people watching him and Wilson, so probably it's only a matter of time before someone shows up here with a warrant."

"You should talk to Nick Fury," Pepper says. She's still got her tablet in one hand, but the fingers of the other are stroking gently through Tony's hair. 

"Good idea. Banner, go get the candles, let's have a séance. --Ow!"

Pepper lets go of the lock of hair. "Tony Stark, that was highly inappropriate. I'm serious, get in touch with Fury and ask him what to do about all this. Don't tell me you guys don't have some way of contacting him."

Tony and Bruce exchange a look. 

~

Past and present lensing again into one another: 

_the slant-light of afternoon lying in bars across a narrow bed, waking out of another series of hazy headachy dreams to find himself propped up on all the pillows plus a rolled-up jacket. It's too hot. His breathing rustles in his chest like dry leaves. Sometimes he thinks lying awake and listening to that sound will drive him mad._

Steve is sitting beside the bed, neatly, not sprawled in the chair the way Bucky always had been, listening to the faint hiss of oxygen and the wheeze and crackle as he breathes. The head of the bed is raised to make it easier, but Bucky is obviously having to put effort into the process, even asleep: his lips are parted, two little lines deeply drawn between his eyebrows. His hands lie empty on the covers, half-curled. People are supposed to look younger when they're asleep; Steve is sure he read that somewhere. Bucky looks at once as if he's halfway through his twenties and going on a thousand. 

Banner has been terribly patient. Steve doesn't know if that's because he's having to put extra super effort into not turning green and monosyllabic or because he genuinely sympathizes. The effort of answering questions had exhausted Bucky, and Steve was stupidly proud when he dozed off on his own-- _sans_ personal Captain America security blanket. 

_Everything's subtly distorted, pulled too tight. The light picking out the metal of the bedstead seems to flake off in slow gleams as he turns his head on the pillows. Distantly the sounds of the street rise up through an atmosphere like syrup: somebody's radio playing Billie Holiday, a car backfiring, voices raised in argument. His tongue feels huge, a vast slab filling his mouth. The air in his throat and chest is almost solid, a column chugging back and forth as he works to breathe. He knows he mustn't think about it, because that makes everything ten times worse, but oh_ no _there's the miserable tickle starting at the back of his throat and he swallows hard but it won't stop and his toastrack chest hitches in a gasp and he's coughing, coughing so hard black spots bounce before his eyes and his head thuds and whacks like a turnip full of blood and--_

_\--and sturdy gentle hands bend him over and hold him steady, grounding the awful spasms, someone's thumping him on the back to help bring up the nastiness, telling him it's okay, he's gonna be fine, just breathe--_

"...just breathe," he's saying, seventy-odd years later, "I got you, it's okay, c'mon." 

Bucky is making terrible sounds, harsh and raw, sharp with the resonance of fluid being moved. Christ, had _he_ sounded like that back in the horrible walk-up in Brooklyn? Steve hauls him upright and holds him steady, careful of his hurt side, and rubs firmly between his shoulderblades, pushing away the weird sensation of being in two times at once, holding and being held. The sound changes abruptly. Bucky's eyes open wide, red-rimmed and brilliant, and he gives Steve a panicky desperate look over the metal hand pressed to his mouth. That doubling sensation is so strong it makes him dizzy because Steve _knows_ exactly what he needs and is already reaching for the box of tissues on the stand beside the bed. It is so disorienting seeing this from the other side. 

After Bucky's brought up the crud, though, he can breathe again, and droops against Steve's shoulder gasping and panting, holding his right side. He tries to say something, but doesn't have the breath for it just yet. "It's okay," Steve tells him, vividly aware of the realness and solidity, the fever-heat of the body next to him, of the way in which Bucky takes up space. He presses his face into the thick softness of Bucky's hair, breathes in his scent, doubling again: now he's the one panting and exhausted in the safety of strong arms, now he's the one lending the strength.

"...Was it...always that lousy?" Bucky manages. "When that happened to you?"

"Um. Kind of, yes. --You get used to it," Steve adds, hurriedly, because Bucky groans. "Really, it's not so bad--"

"I can't believe you had to go through this... _all the time_. I'd have lost it."

He blinks down at the top of Bucky's head, and a moment later Bucky looks up at him. "I mean it, Steve," he says, just for this moment fixed and firm in time, the part of him that's _him_ looking out through the too-old eyes. "You were a tough little punk even back then."

The moment passes, and he can see confusion slide back into Bucky's gaze--and frustration, as he tries to hold on to the memory and it slithers through his grip. It had been there, though. Steve had seen him in there as clearly as he sees himself reflected in his friend's eyes. 

Oh but hope is _cruel_.

The first time Bucky had regained consciousness in Stark Tower, it had been the Winter Soldier who opened his eyes. Stark and Banner had been talking animatedly amongst themselves, stuff Steve didn't catch and wasn't trying to understand. Stark talks with his hands, never still even when at rest; Banner is always calm until he isn't, and then things tend to break. The two of them together can be exhausting to watch and difficult to follow, even if you know all the words, because they don't actually need to say everything out loud: one of them will start "What if we--" and the other will have gone through pages of mental calculations in a few seconds and reply with "Wouldn't work because--" and it just goes on like that. Steve isn't sure "science boyfriends" is really an appropriate collective noun for the pair of them, but it does convey the experience. 

The monitors had registered a change, and Stark went over to investigate, eyes bright with anticipation. "He's waking up. --Hi there, Mr. Soldier. Tony Stark, Stark Industries. Can I call you Winter?-- _hllk!_ "

Steve had to admit it was impressive how fast the Soldier went from unconscious to throttling. There had been no hesitation at all as soon as he'd identified Stark as _not safe_ : he'd sat bolt upright on the bed despite how much it had to hurt his ribs, and the arm moved too fast for Steve to register it, but Stark's neck was suddenly in the grip of a metal hand and his neverending chatter was cut off in a choked gurgle; then the Winter Soldier gave a single powerful heave and flung Stark bodily across the room.

For a moment he and Banner had frozen, too, and then Steve grabbed for the Winter Soldier's shoulders and shook him. "Bucky! _Bucky_ , stop, it's okay, you're safe, you're _safe_ here, I promise, I'm not gonna let anyone hurt you--"

It was like looking into a doll's eyes, a mannequin's, blank and expressionless, and then something behind them slid a little and Bucky blinked, looking heartbreakingly confused--and slumped forward into Steve's grip. Banner straightened up with a syringe in his hand. 

"What did you do?" Steve demanded. "What did you just give him?"

"Sedative and anxiolytic," Banner told him, and there was that edge on his words that Steve knew meant he was having to throw more than the usual amount of effort into his patience. He wrapped his arms around Bucky, heavy with the loose boneless weight of drugged unconsciousness, and eased him back down to the pillows. 

"Thanks for your concern, everyone, I'm fine," Stark was rasping behind him, getting to his feet. "Nobody panic." He rubbed at the red marks appearing on his throat. "That's established a behavioral baseline, wouldn't you agree, Dr. Banner? You're welcome, by the way."

"Impressive," said Banner. "He's pushing 103 and his sats are the kind of low that on a base-model human would be cause for active concern, but the reaction time is hardly impaired at all." 

"Strong fella, too," Stark said drily. "Okay, while he's off in dreamland, let's get some scans done. I want a look inside that eyesore of a Special Hydra Engineering Project."

It wasn't an eyesore, Steve didn't say. It was actually rather beautiful, even with the clicking and glitching and the way it smelled kind of like overworked electric train transformers had when he was a kid. He couldn't stop looking at the way the plates fitted into one another to form the curves of muscle and bone. 

Now, holding Bucky in the curve of his own arm, his friend's face tucked against his neck, he makes himself remember that it is not that long since Bucky was under active Hydra control, and that just in the short space of time since Steve found him, he's already made a lot of progress. Once he's better, Steve thinks, once he's well again, this will be easier, this process of teasing out the strands of Sergeant James Barnes from the rest of the tangled knot inside that head will hurt everybody less. Because he _is_ still in there, Steve knows that now. Just...not how much of him there is, or if the pieces can ever actually fit back together again in any functional way. 

It doesn't matter, he realizes. It does not matter what the answer to that question is, because Steve has made his decision already. Made it seventy-odd years ago. No matter what: _I'm with you to the end of the line._

He strokes the soft feathers of Bucky's hair, gathers him a little closer. The things that are happening inside his own chest are irrelevant. It does not matter how he feels. Kissing Bucky's forehead to bring him out of the panic attack had been nothing more than instinct. The fact that it had also felt like he imagines parched earth must feel in the first moments of a rainstorm, an astonishing and so-long-needed, desperately needed gift--that doesn't matter. Nor does it matter that

_yes, okay, he can admit this to himself in the privacy of his own head_

he loves him, he has loved his friend since childhood, that it has always been Bucky he loves better than anyone else in the world. That has no bearing. He has absolutely no right to expect anything but friendship from Bucky, especially now. 

And Bucky moves a little in his sleep, mumbling something, and his flesh-and-blood hand lifts from the covers and reaches vaguely until it encounters Steve's shirt. His fingers drift up, patting at Steve's chest, and then curl around a fold of the shirt's fabric and cling; and Bucky sighs and presses his face closer against Steve's neck. 

Steve has read somewhere--in one of those fantasy books Sam lends him, probably--the statement that _personal_ is not the same as _important_. Now, looking down at Bucky sleeping against his shoulder, he thinks that it's true, and that it is, like hope, a cruel truth.


	5. Chapter 5

_and he comes when he's summoned_  
 _and he does what must be done_  
 _and he lives for the movement_  
 _he takes pride in being one_  
 _of the lucky and the chosen and the perfect men_  
 _and the stranger_  
 _is with us again_

\--Tony Carey, _The Stranger_

Morning, grey and rainy. Over lower Manhattan a bit of sun creeps through the clouds, splashing watery reflections from the mirror-finished skyscrapers, silvering the distant sheet of the Hudson beyond. 

They all have floors in Stark Tower, but in point of fact Barton and Stark and Banner more or less share the living quarters without much discrimination. Banner does spend much of his time alone in his own laboratory, or in the room Stark's had fitted out for him as a very sedate and unexciting office. When Barton's there, which isn't often, he is to be found sprawled on the couch in the main living-room taking up as much space as physically possible and flipping channels on Stark's two-thousand-inch TV or playing snark tennis with Stark himself. And Tony wears the whole damn building like the suit. 

Pepper has her own apartment, nominally, but after Extremis she had pretty much moved full-time into the tower. Most of the time her dreams are quiet and uneventful. Sometimes they aren't. 

Sometimes they feel like fire and terror and the awful uncertainty of who she is and was and has been. Those mornings she has to examine herself carefully in the bathroom mirror for any hint of light inside her pupils, even though she knows perfectly well they'd gotten the stuff out of her, she is clean, she is safe, she is Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, and she will never again become a weapon. 

It had meant a lot to her when Tony destroyed the suits. It had meant more when the surgery was finished and he was for the first time in years _not_ subject to the function of a tiny glowing circle in his chest, that the shrapnel was gone and he was just a man again. 

But even then she had known the suit would be needed. It hadn't come as a surprise when, less than a year later, she'd found him working on it once more. Since the S.H.I.E.L.D.-Hydra catastrophe, now and then Pepper's glad of it, of its protection. There are three now, a fourth underway, and that's all he plans on building for the moment. But the world isn't safe--the world is _really_ not safe, she knows that viscerally now--and she is just a little glad the suit is there, in case he needs it.

She rolls over in bed and looks at Tony's blamelessly-sleeping back as he breathes. There's always a slight sense of irritation watching somebody else sleep while you can't; after a moment or two she sighs, slides out of the bed, and goes to make coffee.

Romanoff--Natasha, Pepper reminds herself--is there already, standing at the floor-to-ceiling window and looking out over the city, arms wrapped round herself as if the room's air holds a chill. She turns a little when Pepper comes in, and Pepper catches the faint silver glint of the arrow necklace at her throat. 

"Hey," Pepper says, slightly awkward. "I didn't know anyone else was awake." It's early--very early by Stark standards. 

"It's okay." Natasha comes over, tucking hair behind her ear--it's water-straight now, several shades lighter than when she had first come into Tony's and Pepper's lives--and gets out another mug. "Bad dreams?"

Pepper is aware of how much taller she is, even without the four-inch executive heels, and also how easy it is to underestimate Natasha, and thinks: Clint Barton is a fortunate man. She shrugs, taking the mug: black, three sugars. Good memory, Romanoff. "Thanks. They're going away, but, well. Stuff like this always stirs up the memories."

Stuff like the vintage wetwork asset in the infirmary. Natasha just nods, pulls herself up to sit on the countertop. She's in one of Barton's shirts and a pair of sweatpants, and looks about eighteen. "You haven't read his file." It isn't a question. 

"No."

"You don't want to. Trust me." She swirls her coffee. "There are some things you should know, though. Has Stark told you the basics?"

"Only that he was once Steve Rogers' best friend, back in the forties, everyone thought he'd died in the line of duty, and then it turned out he'd been brainwashed by Hydra and made into this...what, legendary assassin? That half the intelligence community didn't even believe existed until he showed up in DC shooting everybody?"

"Good as far as it goes," says Natasha. "In 1944, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, along with the rest of the 107th, were captured and made prisoners of war. A Dr. Arnim Zola experimented on Barnes before Captain America got there and rescued everybody. That was evidently why he didn't die from the fall." She still looks like an undergraduate, but a hard edge has crept into her voice: not harsh, just hard, unyielding. Pepper realizes she's still holding her coffee mug, and burns her mouth with a too-fast swig. 

"The file doesn't cover all the details of what they did to him, but the removal and replacement of the arm is gone into in some detail. Stark's going to want to read that section before he starts working on him. In those days the technology they had to work with was...lacking, and the first few entries after the file begins, describing the wipe procedure, demonstrate that they weren't 100% effective. I think that's why he has any memory at all left of Barnes. He won't have much of one of the intervening decades except flashes of wherever he was being stored and prepared. The rest of the time he was in cryo, that won't register.

"Then there are the kill stats." Now Natasha's voice is inexorable. "Over two dozen assassinations in the past fifty years. According to the file...one of his missions was Howard and Maria Stark. Make it look like a car accident. Make it believable. The Winter Soldier is...was...really good at suspending disbelief."

Pepper doesn't drop the coffee mug, but her knuckles on it are blue-white, shiny. 

"He vanished between missions, back in the fridge. Because he was active over such a long period, people sort of assumed he was a ghost story, cause it absolutely couldn't all have been the same guy, but the kills were all...characteristic. While he was still active with Hydra...going after him was pointless. I tried."

"Did you..."

"Ever work with him when I was KGB? No. Five years ago," Natasha says, pulling up the hem of Barton's crumpled T-shirt, "near Odessa, I got my tires shot out in the middle of a job. Lost control, went over a cliff. I got the engineer I was extracting out of the car, and the Winter Soldier was waiting for us. I was guarding my engineer. He shot the guy. Through me."

There's an ugly pink blotch of scar above Natasha's hip on the left side. Pepper stares, blinking. "I--"

"You're getting the picture," the calm voice goes on, letting the shirt cover the scars once more. "You have to understand that what Hydra did to him is not just turn all other people into missions, into objects to break, into targets to make holes in the most efficient way he could. It made him into an object, too. If he is broken, it doesn't matter. Self-preservation is a secondary concept."

Pepper stares into the dregs of coffee. Sugar grains are visible, little pale dots in a dark sea. "Tony's _father_ ," she breathes. 

"And a number of heads of state. A lot of the unfortunate accidents in the past half century might not actually be all that accidental. I'm telling you this because you need to know what he's been capable of. Even if Rogers does manage to get some of him back, there's that fifty years of being a weapon in someone else's hand standing between him and it. Sam Wilson said it, right before the end: he might not be the kind you save, he might just be the kind you stop."

"But you're here," says Pepper. "You're not on the phone to Coulson to give him up for whatever interrogation or...or punishment they might have in store."

"Yeah." Natasha looks down at the floor between her bare feet; the hair swings over her face, a curtain, and again she could be an undergraduate with nothing more on her mind than chem 101 and boys. "Yeah, I'm here. And Clint's here. Partly for Rogers' sake. I owe him. Partly because if the Winter Soldier goes into murder mode, you're gonna need all the assets you can get. And partly because I want to think people are capable of surviving unspeakable things and still remaining people at the other end."

Barton is the only one of them with direct experience of mind control, Pepper thinks. That's probably why _he's_ here. She herself knows what it was like to be weaponized by somebody else against her will. Tony's got the desperate, terrifying panic attacks, although those seemed to be lessening their frequency. Banner has a lot of things he'd like not to remember doing. 

"I guess none of us are exactly healthy round the psyche," Pepper says, after a long moment, and puts down the mug. "Despite what we'd like to think."

"I'm sorry," says Natasha, and looks up at her, eyes circled. "I know you didn't want to hear much of what I just said."

"Maybe I needed to, though." 

"I told Steve he might not want to pull on this particular thread. But he did, and I guess I'm in it now. You don't have to be."

"If Tony is, I do."

Natasha looks at her, searching, and then nods. She slips down off the countertop and pulls the hair back into a ponytail. "I'm gonna wake Clint up, I need to spar."

Pepper is very white, her freckles standing out like sprays of light-brown ink. "Okay. I'll...put another pot of coffee on. And then maybe have a conversation with Mr. Stark."

Natasha reaches out very briefly to squeeze her shoulder, and is gone. 

~

This is familiar but the perspective is all wrong, like looking at your reflection in a spoon, upside down and the wrong way round. He knows there were long hours of watching by a bed, somewhere back in the vaguely sepia-toned sections of his mind. Sometimes scared, sometimes exhausted, most of the time just tired and anxious--and careful not to show it. He remembers bubbles and flickers of this, pipe-cleaner fingers curled with his own, looking down into a pale closed narrow little face, blond hair dark-gold with sweat flopping over a worried forehead. Remembers making jokes--had he made jokes? had he known how?--to tease a smile out of...Steve. Stevie, who better not be coming down with pneumonia again, the little punk, that had really scared him a couple of times when he was sure Steve would stop breathing entirely, glowing with fever and struggling so hard for air it made his own chest tight just watching...

...no, because he really _can't_ breathe, his chest is full of mud, everything hurts, his right side is on fire, his left arm feels heavy and dull as if he's slept on it funny, and the room is too bright and he's lying in bed and that's wrong because he is the one who makes this go away, he is the one who tells Steve to breathe, he is the one who lifts him off the pillows and thumps him on the back and says it's gonna be okay...

"--be okay," and someone's holding him while he coughs and coughs, _Steve_ 's holding him, and for a moment he's back in the Hydra factory shackled to a gurney and Steve's there, a vastly changed Steve who snaps the restraints and hauls Bucky to his feet. It's that Steve and somehow it's also the too-thin earnest kid from the bubble-memories. A firm hand holds him upright, steadying him through the spasms, and Steve taps the side of his hand down his back and some of the horrible clogging thickness that's choking him _moves_ \--

It's not the first time, he realizes. He has no real understanding of the passage of time, hasn't had for a while now, only that he's been here for a while in this room, in this bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, and that every time he's woken up Steve has been there.

Steve, who has...two black eyes and a split lip, he sees, once he's able to breathe and think again. What the hell happened? Where are they? _When_ are they?

"Did....I do that?" he rasps, looking up at Steve. 

"It's not your fault, Bucky. You've been pretty sick, you didn't know who I was half the time, you panicked."

" _Been_ pretty sick," he repeats, closing his eyes for a moment. "Feel like....something with tank treads ran over me." He's aware there is a huge horrible mass of memory and time hanging over him, and just hopes it can hang on a little longer, let him be Bucky in this bubble out of time. 

"Yeah, well, welcome to the pneumonia club." Steve's voice is warm, fond. 

"Hell no, you can keep membership exclusive. Not my style." If he doesn't look at his left arm, if he doesn't do that, maybe this won't go away. And if he doesn't ask questions. 

"It's better nowadays, they've got some pretty nifty drugs. None of that sulfa stuff. You're on the mend, Buck, you're gonna be just fine."

Had Steve actually kissed his forehead, or was that just a splinter of dream in amongst the bits of actual recollection? He could have sworn that really happened. That had been completely unexpected and rather wonderful. 

"Sorry about your face," he rasps, after too long a moment. "I mean the punching. Not takin' responsibility for the rest of it."

"Jerk." Steve smiles, that curved dimply smile that had always done something weird to his insides. It's still doing something weird, even though Steve's mouth is bruised and he looks pretty damn haggard underneath the stubble and black eyes. "Apology accepted."

"Punk." He yawns. Oh, hell, he's falling asleep again, he really doesn't want to. He reaches up with his dull, stupid left hand--so heavy, no, don't think about it, don't think about it--and pushes back the hair from his face. When the hell had it gotten this long? And why were his fingers metal?

Why _were_ his fingers metal and why exactly did he have a sudden, visceral, terrible memory of punching Steve's exhausted, bruised, bleeding, above all _dear_ face with that metal hand, over and over and over

_you're my mission_

until something had stopped him, something had stopped all the world and struck him dizzy and blinking

_then finish it_

_because I'm with you till the end of the line_

Past and present double again, tremble, blur. Through a haze like the wavering air above a brushfire Bucky can see himself, holding out a key to a tired, grieving Steve. _I can make it on my own_.

That shoulder frail as a bird's under his hand. _Yeah, but you don't have to. I'm with you..._

Falling away from the train, the useless rail still clutched in his left hand, falling away from light and warmth and air. 

Waking to Zola's face, the buzzwhine of a saw, pain so astonishing it flared light behind his eyes and froze his mouth closed against a scream. Waking again to the unfamiliar weight of the arm, the way it pulled at his shoulder and collarbone, made the muscles of his right side tense against the strain. Voices. Instructions. Repeating name, rank, serial number; backhand blows sending sparks through his vision with each repetition. _No. Codename for asset is the Winter Soldier._

He'd liked snow, once. Steve couldn't go out in it unless he had to, of course, and half the damn time he was having to run interference so Steve could get from point A to point B without being knocked down and having snow rubbed in his face, shoved down his collar. He'd found Steve curled up like that once, trying to breathe through a throat that was fighting him, blue lips and fingernails, terrible gasps, and Bucky had just hauled Steve up into his arms and carried him through the wet ice-slick streets, carried him to the only doctor who took IOUs and that only because Bucky in his uniform _loomed._ He'd been so aware of Steve's thin fingers clutching at his lapel, huddling against his chest. But he'd liked snow. 

The chair, and the cryo tank, and darkness. Training, in between the darkness. Training until his body was as much a weapon as the guns and knives he used. There was some dull physical pleasure in that, in being in total control, never tiring, each new discipline settling into his body's memory and bypassing his mind's. 

Looking through scopes, in a dozen different cities. Returning with mission reports he can't remember, lists of people he doesn't recall killing. The chair. The tank. All of it cycled over and over and over, faster and faster, until the pipeline of images stopped in the bright light on that bridge. 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

Pierce, talking to him about freedom. The chair. But _who the hell is Bucky?_ On the falling Helicarrier, facing Captain America. _You know me. You've known me all your life._

 _No I don't!_ Desperate, furious.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

His head was splitting, the jagged cracks running right through the center of him. _Shut up!_

_I'm not going to fight you. You're my friend._

The shield, falling away, diminishing. The pain from the girder landing on him forgotten. Just the drive to finish the mission, to shut up that voice, to end it, to stop it saying words he was not allowed to believe.

 _Till the end of the line_.

And then Steve was falling, and with him everything else, and the Winter Soldier had had only one decision left to make. 

Blackness, for a little space of time, and then:

"--he's coming out of it, I think--"

"--much did you give him?--"

"--only just about enough by the looks of it, everyone except Rogers get back out of his range--"

"--I hate to interrupt, sir, but we may have a problem. There appear to be three highly-armed helicopters en route to the tower, ETA seven point eight minutes--"

"--cannot _believe_ the timing here, Underbed Red--"

"--Bucky?"

Dizzy, head spinning with the vertigo of an entire life being twisted round its axis, James Buchanan Barnes opens eyes that are his own for the first time in decades.


	6. Chapter 6

_no one makes it out of here alive_  
 _and we all do what we need to to survive_  


\--Tony Carey, _The New Frontier_

"Well, if it isn't Revenant Agent Coulson," Stark says pleasantly, glass in hand, as the black-clad special forces officers _huthuthuthut_ their way down the spiral staircase from the helipad. Pepper's sitting on the arm of a sofa, and makes a little move to rise, but stays put. "How can Stark Industries make your tomorrow better?"

"You know why we're here," says Coulson, and a moment later Maria Hill, in a slick suit and a Stark Industries ID badge, comes down the steps after them. She's talking on her phone, apparently telling the other two gunships to back off and hold position, because this is what they do. The heavy throbbing of their rotors doesn't rattle the thick glass of the windows, but there's a low vibration in the air nonetheless. It's a neat little representation of the tension that's _also_ in the air. 

"Do I?" Stark opens his eyes wide, guileless. It's the _who, me?_ look pretty much everyone close to him absolutely loathes. 

"Don't make this difficult, Mr. Stark," says Coulson, and then Hill absently, accidentally tilts her phone so the light from the brightening morning flashes briefly across Tony's face. He reads the words on the screen, and absolutely nothing in his face, stance, or attitude changes whatsoever. He just takes a sip of his drink, gestures at Coulson with the glass. 

"You fellows don't indulge on duty, I'm assuming," he says, deliberately tinkling ice against Steuben crystal. "Ms. Hill? No?"

"Also it's nine-thirty in the morning, Mr. Stark."

"Oh, is it? I haven't been to bed," he lies. "Sorry, do enlighten me, I don't think I'm on the right page yet. Still kind of stumbling around in the my-penthouse-den-is-full-of-assault-rifles section of the script. --I wonder if that translates as something else, like 'my hovercraft is full of eels'?"

"We want the Winter Soldier. We know he's here, we tracked him and Rogers. Don't make this messy; hand him over and this can all be cleaned up with a minimum of housekeeping difficulties," says Coulson. 

"Assuming just for a moment that I have the slightest idea what you're talking about, if I don't produce this fictitious entity, 'housekeeping difficulties' are guaranteed?" The inverted commas are audible over the whop-whop of the helos outside. There are a lot of black barrels pointing at them. Black holes like eyes.

Pepper comes to stand with Tony, and he puts his arm around her, hand on her waist just a little tighter than is perhaps comfortable. 

"I'm afraid the guarantee is backed by the Office of Strategic Intelligence," says Coulson. Stark's eyes pass from him to the hut-hut soldiers to Hill, to Pepper, down to his whiskey glass. He sighs. 

"That what you're calling yourselves now? Catchy. I suppose I'd better come clean. Yes, I did it, with my little private jet. Won't you sit down, Agent? I'll see if he's in any shape to be extracted."

"Tony!" Pepper wrenches away from him. 

"I'm sorry, Pep, but it's beyond my control. This is too big for us. Always has been."

"You're just _letting_ them--" She bites off the sentence. The soldiers, assault rifles pointed correctly at the floor, shuffle slightly with embarrassment. "I hope you know what you're doing, Tony Stark. I really hope you know that."

"So do I. C'mon." He takes her arm, propelling her to the elevator. "Won't be a moment," he says to Coulson and Hill. "I'll just nip down there and get him packed up and gift-wrapped for you, no extra charge." 

"I'll go with you," says Hill. 

In the elevator Tony sighs, looks at Pepper, who is white with fury. "Pep. Pepper. Ms. Potts. Trust me. Can you do that? Trust me."

She looks into his face, and after a moment her mouth twists up and she nods. "--Good girl. Er, not you, Ms. Hill," he adds, as Hill joins them and the elevator doors shut. "Ms. Potts, there's an SI lunch meeting of which for once I am aware and as usual will not be able to make. I need you to be there and do your usual fantastic job."

"Yes, Mr. Stark," she says coldly. When the elevator stops at the next floor she gets out and walks away without a backwards glance. 

The doors close with a whisper. Hill gives him a look, then glances up at the corners of the car. He shakes his head. "Clear. What's your angle?"

"Extracting the Winter Soldier," she says, and despite the business-casual makeup her eyes are drilling holes in him. The message on her phone had been as short and information-free as possible, and he's not sure where anything exactly stands.

"Yeah, about that. if you're serious, you're gonna have to deal with some resistance." 

"I said _extracting the Winter Soldier_. Work with me a little here, Stark." His phone vibrates in his pocket; he pulls it out, reads the text; for a moment his eyes flicker wider. Just for a moment. 

"Welp," he says. "Rogers is going to be really goddamn unhappy about this."

"He'll have to lump it." 

The doors of the elevator slide open and Hill stalks out ahead of him. 

~

Twenty minutes later, Tony and Pepper are watching a stretcher be carried to the helicopter. The man lying under the thin sheet is heavy with drugged unconsciousness, his wrists and ankles cuffed to the stretcher. An oxygen mask is strapped over his face. One of the special-forces soldiers is holding up an IV bag as they haul him on board and fasten him down. Dark hair spills over the pillow. Banner ducks under the gathering rotor wash to climb in beside his patient. 

Hill clears the penthouse and hurries over to the chopper. "Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Stark!" she calls. 

"You were right," he calls back. "It's the right thing to do."

As they come back down the stairs to the penthouse bar, Tony's fingers tap out something on the phone in his pocket, and the window glass briefly dims and then returns to normal, unnoticeable on the outside beyond the mirror coating. He and Pepper watch, her stiff and unyielding beside him in her Armani suit, as the two other gunships flank the one lifting off from the tower and head south for DC.

"How is he?" Tony asks Barton, in the bar, who is rubbing his hand and grimacing. 

"Rogers? Guy's like punching concrete. I think I cracked something. He should be out for a little while yet, though."

"Excellent." Tony finishes his drink, reaches for a convenient flat surface for the glass. Pepper twitches it out of his fingers with a little angry noise and sets it out of the way. "--Give the Board my love, okay? Hugs and kisses to every last one of them."

"Don't," she says. "Not right now. Okay? Just don't. I'll talk to you later." 

Few people can make a dramatic exit quite like Pepper Potts. Tony watches her go, shaking his head, and then turns to Barton. "--Give us like, half an hour tops. I want you and Nat there too, it's important."

His own exit is anticlimactic, hurrying down the stairs. Left alone, Barton helps himself to two fingers of Macallan and flops onto the couch, not for the first time wondering if it was a supremely bad idea to get involved in any of this, and knowing that he couldn't really have done anything else. 

Because he remembers, too, waking up with Nat beside him, on the helicarrier. Remembers hazy fluid rather nauseatingly unsteady moments: the haggard black figure of the god with his scepter-spear thing, the way everything was outlined in moving blue as he approached, and then the rush of cold all through his veins as the point of the spear touched his chest. 

(For weeks afterward he'd had a deep black bruise there, under all his other bruises and cuts, as if Loki had fired a rubber bullet at his sternum instead of gently touching him with that metal point.)

Then just snatches of blue-filtered awareness. There was a hook made of ice in his head, ice that burned. Loki held the line attached to the hook, and _tugged_ it every time Clint Barton fought his way up to the surface of consciousness. The flare of freezing pain had always pushed him back again, hiding away inside his own head. Each time it got harder and harder to try and come out again. By the time Nat knocked him out he was guttering like a candle-flame drowning in its own wax.

The horrible awareness of how little of his strength was left had hit him the moment he woke. He'd almost welcomed the control by then, leaned on it. The hook in his head meant he didn't have to think. 

And that was only a matter of days. Barnes had had that hook lodged in the soft meat of his brain for...sixty years? Seventy? 

Barton doesn't know if it's possible to exist without the control, once it's been there for so long. But Nat had wanted to be here. That had been enough to make up his mind. 

Heh. Make up his mind. Stark would have jumped on that. 

He sits on the couch with his right hand aching like a rotten tooth, knocks back his drink, and shuts his eyes. For right now he is safe enough, secure enough in this place to let himself doze unguarded. 

~

"Mr. Barton? Mr. Stark is asking for you, on level twelve." JARVIS's voice. Level twelve: infirmary. 

When he gets there everything is extra-super weird. Barnes is awake and sitting up, looking less like a psychotic hobo and more like a confused and really spacy dude with a jacked-up metal arm. Barton can hear it crackling slightly as he moves. On the bed next to his, Steve Rogers is coming to, sporting a new red-purple bruise on the point of his jaw. Barton observes this last with a flicker of pride. 

Rogers blinks, looks over at Barnes, closes his eyes, and then does the most classic double-take Barton has seen in ages. He sits up straight, stares from Barnes to Tony Stark, who is emitting critical levels of smug at the foot of the bed, arms folded. Back to Barnes, his mouth opening and shutting with no actual words coming out, and back to Stark. 

Barton thinks that if Stark had been in range of Captain America's fists just then, he too would be nursing a bruise. Natasha comes up beside him, and because it is her Barton doesn't turn to look as she approaches and comes close enough to lean against him; he just puts his arm around her and rests his cheek against the silk of her hair. 

"Good news, everybody," Stark is saying, and, yeah, wow, that is some _weapons-grade_ smug he's got going on. "The hunt for Bedhead October has at least temporarily come to a halt. Don't everybody thank me at once."

"What," Rogers manages. "What the."

Barton is still snickering at "bedhead october" but he has to admit the look on Rogers' face is kind of terrible at the same time as hilarious.

"Agent Coulson and Ms. Hill have been visiting for tea and threats of violence. A little while ago, a person fitting the description of the erstwhile Winter Soldier was duly hauled off in a chopper bristling with armament, accompanied by two more, and taken to a nondisclosed location. Dr. Banner has gone with to ensure his patient is treated appropriately and effectively. In a few days, the good doctor will return to the tower, and we of course won't be allowed to ask him any questions, at least ones like 'where.' National Security, you understand." His grin could probably stand on its own without the rest of him supporting it.

"I don't understand _anything,_ " Rogers moans, rubbing his face. "Also who hit me this time?"

"I did," Barton volunteers, and is only a little surprised when Barnes growls at him. Actually growls. Like 'grr'. He'd been listening to Stark's little explanation with zero expression whatsoever, but now there's definite menace in his face. Barton shrugs. "Had to. Verisimilitude, Cap. You were freaking out, as you were pretty much expected to do, but we had to make it look believable. If it helps, I think I broke my hand on your face." He does. That jaw is apparently made out of uranium.

Rogers just stares hazily, so lost and exhausted and hurt and full of terrible hope he can't answer, but Barnes does: "You get one," he rasps, voice rough from disuse. "Touch him again...and I'll break the rest of you."

"Heeeeey, look at that, he threatens in sentences! Terse ones, anyhow. Better than nothing. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Sergeant Barnes, Capsicle here can no doubt explain the basics once he reboots."

"What did you _do_ ," Rogers asks, sounding, yes, a little more functional. Stark gives a put-upon sigh, but Barton can tell he's happy as a clam to explain, waving his hands around. 

"When they arrived I thought they were serious. Agent...Ms. Hill explained that in fact this operation had been in the planning stages for a little while now: she'd apparently already used her SI clearance to get an agent inside the damn building, which, that reminds me, JARVIS, gotta rewrite the security systems again if _Hill_ is able to get in without me knowing. Where was I? Oh, right. So she and Coulson show up with all of the guns, every last one of them, and as soon as she's downstairs we let the others in on the plan. We come in and announce your pal there is wanted by O.S.I. or whatever they're calling themselves, you have a righteous hissyfit, Barton knocks you out, and I'm just glad Barnes wasn't conscious at the time or I have absolutely no doubt he'd have gone for us."

Rogers is registering information, but it's having a hard time getting there. "You...had to make me believe it was real?"

"You're a rotten liar. Better for you and Pep to think it was the real McCoy, although frankly if we'd have thought about it much more clearly we'd have known we'd have to deck you before you let anyone take him _anywhere_ without your say-so." Stark looks, inasmuch as this is possible for him, rueful. "Anyway, so we get Hill's kid--some intern, probably made his entire life for him--all strapped down to the stretcher covered in wires and oxygen masks and makeup and hair, looking as much like Barnes here as possible, and off Hill and Coulson go with their merry men in black. And women. And guns. I can't stress enough the gunniness of this whole operation."

"But...do Hill and Coulson...no, they can't...who's _running_ this?" Rogers demands. "Where are they taking the decoy Bucky? Who wanted Bucky in the first place?"

"Can't kill you if you're already dead, and can't retrieve you from friendly harbor if you've already been retrieved," Stark says. "If anybody's after him right now, and I'm betting they will be, they won't look here." He pats Rogers' foot. "Excitement's over, Captain. Go on back to sleep, you look like you need it. I won't suggest anybody _else_ knock you out just now, you're running out of face to punch. Excuse me, I have to go prepare to placate Ms. Potts. A lot. With emphatic gestures." 

Stark bows elegantly to the lot of them, and takes himself off, whistling. Barton is very aware of being glowered at, but he's been glowered at by gods, and anyway he's a little more concerned with how much his hand hurts. Nat is looking at it carefully, hissing in sympathy, and he knows she's trying to be as gentle as possible but _ow_. She doesn't look up. "JARVIS, can you--"

"Already working on it, Ms. Romanoff. Mr. Barton's hand appears to be fractured in two places, but they are quite minor and should be easily set and immobilized."

"C'mon," she says to him, and neither of them care about their audience when she cups a hand to Barton's neck and kisses him firmly. "Better get this over with before you swell up too much."

How often does a setup like that come along, he wonders, and times it perfectly: "That's what she said." It falls a little flat because he can hear his own voice is slightly off, tight with pain, but Nat snickers and rolls her eyes anyway, taking him by the good hand and towing him away.

~

They're alone.

Except for JARVIS, anyway, but Steve's finally kind of getting used to him. He can at least ignore the AI's presence a good sixty percent of the time. 

He's shivery with spent adrenaline, dizzy from the emotional whiplash of the past hours. He needs to sleep, badly he needs it, but he can't, not yet. 

"...Buck?" Steve asks softly, quietly, not daring to hope for an answer. After a moment, with a clicking-whirring-glitching sound, a battered silver hand reaches out across the space between beds. When he reaches to lace his fingers with the metal ones he can feel their strength, feel just how easily Bucky could reduce his hand to pulp and bone-shards. He can feel, too, just how carefully that strength is held in check, because there is a mind behind it. 

Bucky doesn't speak, but the careful pressure of those fingers is all Steve needs for just now. He lets himself let go of the terrible tension that's filled the four days since he found Bucky in the museum. As soon as he relaxes, everything--the no sleep and the constant miserable worry and the furious terror when he'd thought Bucky was being taken away--all of it rushes up and breaks in a wave over him and carries him down into the dark. 

~

//JARVIS internal security monitoring records, penthouse, 4:15 p.m.//

"You did _what?_ "

A glass smashes. There's a yelp. "--Hey, hey, relax, don't let's be violent about this. I had no time to tell you and anyhow, Pep, you are the smartest, most brilliant, loveliest woman I know but you are the _worst_ liar in the known universe next to Steven G. Rogers."

"You manipulative son of a _bitch_ , you made me believe you!"

"I know I know I know, I'm awful, but I've also got this picture which, look, I'm texting you from over here for safety's sake, but look at this. Just look, Pepper. Tell me this wasn't worth a bit of casual morning deception."

There's a pause. Then "...they're....they're holding hands, Tony. Is Steve actually smiling? It's...sort of hard to tell right now, he's all lumpy."

"He's doing the best he can under the circumstances. If you zoom in--yeah, right there--you can see the Red Scare also has about one pixel's worth of smile going on. We bought them a little bit of time. I dunno how much, but any time's better than none."

Silence, and then heels click across the floor. "Am I forgiven?" 

"Provisionally. You're a complete bastard, and there's a lot you and I need to talk about, but..."

"But I'm _your_ complete bastard, right?"

Sigh. "Yes, damn it, you are."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The little song-lyric epigraphs at the head of every chapter are from Tony Carey's Planet P Project _Go Out Dancing_ and _Pink World_ albums. So far we've had the title song, _The Stranger_ , and _On the New Frontier_. Those of you who have read my other stuff will recognize that one. 
> 
> I'm going to go through and put in the citations but thought I'd add this here for clarification.


	7. Chapter 7

_Can a man be really sure of his spot_  
 _Can he hold on to the little that he thinks he's got_  
 _Can he look around him and trust what he sees_  
\--Tony Carey, _One Star Falling_

~

3 a.m. Tony becomes aware of being watched. 

He turns, slowly. Bucky is standing in the lab doorway. 

He's very pale, in sweatpants and a Led Zeppelin shirt that doesn't fit him, watching, silent, expressionless. Tony tries not to notice the way his bare toes are hunched up away from the chill of the floor tile.

"Can't sleep?" he says. "Join the club. I'm guessing the reason you're here unannounced is either that you have some kind of super special Soviet cloaking device hidden in that Block One model of yours that makes JARVIS unable to see you, _or_ JARVIS is totally aware of you and doesn't consider you a threat. I don't know which one I'm less comfortable with."

Scans of Bucky's arm are hovering in front of him in translucent 3-D cyan. The main structural members and the attachment points for the muscle cables that lock into individual segments to produce movement are outlined in red, under the blue shell. Sixteen different points along the arm and shoulder are glowing bright white: damaged contacts, destroyed connections. "I'm guessing you're having some stiffness in the elbow, specially after repetitive motion such as, oh, punching people in the face a whole bunch of times."

Bucky just looks at him through the hair.

Because Tony is Tony he can't stop twisting. "Hurts here and here, yeah? They didn't have WD-40 behind the iron curtain, or is all this damage from your exciting fun-filled weekend in the nation's capital?" He can still very clearly feel those fingers tightening round his throat. 

Silence. Tony reflects that this guy is capable of the best suitface he's ever seen on anyone who wasn't actually one of his suits. It's pretty much :[ reproduced by human features.

"Not in a talking mood, huh," he says, and turns his back on the Winter Soldier. Only he isn't, not really. He's turning his back on the Winter Soldier _and_ whatever else is in there with him. "'s cool, make yourself comfortable. Hope you don't mind Marvin Gaye." He waves a hand at the robot beside the record player, and it flips a switch: the turntable spins up into motion. The needle drops. There's that tiny scratch-squeal of feedback, and Tony thinks he senses a little indrawn breath from the statue behind him: a sound from that other half-remembered world.

Tony gets on with what he's doing, which is analyzing the actual structure and function of Sgt. Barnes' current prosthesis, and he is aware of the man behind him slowly, over the next hour or so, creeping closer and closer. He knows, too, that Bucky or whatever's been driving him the past half a century is capable of killing with or without tools to help him do the job, that a paperclip would be deadly in those hands if their owner so decided it should be. It is one of the hardest things he's ever had to do, deliberately not turning around to face Bucky, not hunching in automatic expectation of attack. He wants the suit very badly right about now.

But two hours after he first turned to address him, Bucky's standing beside Tony Stark, looking--at a casual glance--just scruffy, desperately tired, and not very well. "Here," he rasps, after a very long time, reaching out his right hand to the 3-D projection, fingertip passing through two of the brightest highlights of the structure. He pokes as if expecting to touch something, as if he can't quite tell the difference between projection and model. "It hurts here and here. Not all the time."

"Yeah, I bet it does," and now Tony's voice is simple, sympathetic, without the former acid. "I can see where they plumbed your nerves in, and there's some structural damage here that's affecting the connections. Did they adjust the power source once they'd put this on, to your knowledge?" There's some indication that at one point the Hydra/Tesseract power source was augmented by a couple of teeny plutonium RTGs, like the ones very briefly used in nuclear pacemakers. Tony thinks it's pretty clear evidence of design by committee, the kind that doesn't take into account the factor of common sense.

"Once," Bucky says, and coughs. "Once that I remember. Early on. It was...better after that. Not much, but better."

(Tony thinks possibly plutonium and the Tesseract don't play well together. Selvig's setup had to use iridium to "stabilize" what Tony has now mentally dubbed Tesserays, and the thing about iridium is that it demonstrates the Mössbauer effect regarding resonance absorption, so the T-rays had to behave similarly to gamma radiation. Hydra's approach to harnessing Tesseradiation was similar in theory, but having other gamma emitters like plutonium really close to the source would fuck up all the very precise equations for the placement of materials. That's an interesting point. He wonders if any of the Paperclip files have anything on the subject.) 

"Hand me that, would you?" Tony says, dismissing resonance absorption for the moment and gesturing casually at a smallish white metal sphere on the workbench beside Bucky's left hand. "Actually, do me a favor and test the grip strength you have right now, squeeze that as hard as you can."

There's a brief hesitation and then the metal fingers close tightly over the ball, and Tony watches. Nothing. Nothing at all, then a faint sound of effort and a metallic creak--and then a crackle and sizzle of shorting electronics, and Bucky drops the unscathed metal ball and wraps his right hand round his left wrist. The smell of hot insulation drifts up.

"It's new," Tony says of the totally uninteresting-looking ball, which has just been subjected to enough force to squish a steel ball-bearing to the general shape of a wad of gum. It's got the same luster as stainless, duller than the chromed finish of Bucky's arm, and weighs about as much as a comparable sphere of titanium. It also happens to be about six and two-thirds times the strength for that same weight. "The only real issue is I can't call it _starkium_ because that sounds really really stupid even to me. Anthonium, maybe. I might even be romantic enough to call it _piperium_. There's not a lot of it to play with yet, it's sort of difficult to synthesize, but in another couple weeks I should have enough to start on your hand."

Bucky looks from the unscathed starkium ball to Tony and back again, flexing his metal fingers. "Why?" is all he asks.

"It's an engineer thing. I can't just sit idly by while you walk around with that hunk of Cold War riveted to your spine, it's like a stylist looking at a mullet. I can rebuild it, I got the technology. Harder, better, faster, stronger."

Bucky says nothing, and Tony doesn't push it, going back to his projections. It's only when a particularly bad coughing fit shakes his visitor that Tony sighs and stops what he's doing long enough to go hook over a chair for Bucky, fetch him a cup of the evil coffee he lives on in the lab. He doesn't ask any questions or make any statements, and when another hour has passed and Bucky has fallen asleep in the chair with his head pillowed on his folded arms, leaning on the workbench, he just waves over one of his bots and gets them to bring a blanket to drape over his shoulders. 

"Let Rogers know," he says to JARVIS. "I don't need him having kittens all over the place when he wakes up to find him gone." His voice is quiet, but there is definitely--but definitely--a hint of smug. "And find my notes on Selvig's machine while you're at it."

 

10 a.m.: Natasha and Clint are having brunch. Tony is poking at a gluten-free waffle and wondering if the gluten is the part that tastes edible, and if so, why everyone's so damn excited about getting rid of it. Pepper is at work. Steve is supposed to be eating but in fact is just sitting there miserably, staring at a cooling cup of coffee with his arms wrapped round himself. Occasionally he looks at something on his phone, but it doesn't seem to be telling him what he wants to hear. 

He's transmitting anxiety on a super wide band at the moment, lots and lots of emotional static, and none of them are really responding very well. Tony's glad when Bruce shows up, looking less worried than he's been the past couple of days. "How's Spyashchaya Krasavitsa?"

Natasha eyebrows him, and for a moment Tony is uncomfortably sure that she knows he's totally been wasting useful time in doing research on new nicknames for Bucky. (Not that he can top the Hunt for Bedhead October. Tony will go to his grave proud of that one.) He eyebrows Nat right back, and Tony Stark can eyebrow with the very best of them. Bruce just gives him a vaguely bemused look. 

"Sleeping," he says. "It looks to me as though his healing factor has decided to get back into the game. I took another series of chest films and they're much clearer. Give it another few days before you start in with the cyborg stuff, but I think he's definitely going to be well enough for that soon."

"There, see? Cheer up, Cap." Tony thinks of adding "and he didn't try to murder me even a little bit in the middle of the night," but decides against it. "Bruce, you think it's wiser to just fabricate the new arm as fast as possible and replace the old one, or do the repairs on the arm as it is so that he can use it better and it doesn't feel awful while he has a chance to be involved in the design of the replacement?"

"Think you answered your own question there, Stark," Clint says, amused. "He's gonna have to have the thing fused to him for the next, well, _ever_. Be nice to have an opportunity to help design it. Like, I dunno. Maybe take off the red star, or put a circle round it with a little X."

"He's right." Bruce is eating...cheerios. Plain cheerios. Tony wonders where he got them. He's convinced they're made of compressed sawdust and certainly hasn't been adding them to the shopping lists of late; Bruce must have made his own grocery run. Oddly, it makes him smile. All of them are slowly, awkwardly coming to find this place becoming not a headquarters but a home. 

He realizes he's wandering and comes back to the conversation at hand in time to hear Bruce say "--important to his recovery."

"You think he _will_ recover," Steve puts in. It's half a statement and half a question, and all of them can hear the awful aching fear under the casual tone. 

"I think there are no guarantees in this kind of case." Bruce takes off his glasses, wipes the lenses carefully with a tissue. Displacement activity, Tony thinks, recognizing something he does all the time. "There are huge areas in his memory that are currently just blank, but in the time since he was last with Hydra some of the blanks have begun to fill themselves in. Your finding and rescuing him accelerated the progress, and you've helped him bridge several gaps. I don't know what will happen if he does remember it all."

Steve's face has so little color in it the now-fading bruises from his various attempts to wake Bucky out of nightmare stand out vividly, smudges of green and yellow and violet. "--Don't go buying trouble before its time," Bruce adds, noticing his expression. "We don't know what will happen. That doesn't mean the worst is automatically more likely. He's interested, at least. He's invested in the process. Just this past night's escapade proves that point sufficiently." 

"He's welcome in the lab. I'm kinda often there at weird hours." Tony shrugs. It had been...okay, yeah, fine, it had been touching, having Barnes ask _why_ , admit to him where it hurt. "And yeah, we'll totally have him involved in the design of the new arm as much as he wants to be. It is going to be _the best_ robot arm anybody ever had grafted onto their body, ever. I'll even refrain from micro-engraving _Stark Industries(TM)_ all over it, how's that for restraint?"

Steve smiles a little, as he is meant to, and the movement hurts his bruised mouth. 

"As I said," Bruce resumes, putting the glasses back on, "he's sleeping now: after I had a look at him and ran the images, he asked if he could have something to help him sleep. That's a good sign, I should think. He's not fighting me and he's capable of remembering from encounter to encounter that I don't pose a threat. I do think, though, that it would be a good idea to move him out of the infirmary and into an actual bedroom, now that he's on the mend."

"Tell him to pick one. I got a few spares." Tony gestures expansively. "Pick a big one with a nice view. You two can fight over who gets the curtains remote as well as the TV remote, it'll be adorable."

Steve's pallor makes the blush, when it does come, brilliant and highly noticeable--but just as quickly it subsides again leaving those smudges of bruise like unkind facepaint. Tony looks away, feeling himself skirt dangerously near the edge of actual sincere empathy, and pokes at his inedible waffles. "Forget this," he says, pushing away the plate and getting up. "I'm having ice cream for breakfast, because I am an adult capable of making reasonable choices." 

"...could I have some too?" asks Captain America, sounding about fourteen. 

~

Over the next two days the tower is silently haunted. Natasha and Clint report two separate instances of being observed while watching TV--both of them turning at the same moment, both their instincts and training pinging off the same input, a moment before he appeared in the doorway. They looked at one another, back to him, shrugged, and went back to _Downton Abbey_ , both still very much aware of being under observation. He stopped just inside the room, head slightly lowered, looking at them through the curtain of hair; his arms hung loose and relaxed, hands open, at his sides. Neither spy said anything at all when he just as silently turned around and left. 

JARVIS tells Tony of his explorations. He has a schematic of the tower pulled up in front of him, with Barnes' movements over the past twenty-four hours tracked in red. "Christ, he's just...mooching around, like a sulking teenager, but he's doing it real quiet-like. I didn't even know he was there yesterday afternoon." Tony zooms in on the garage where he had been polishing one of the Audis: there is a red dot just in the doorway that indicates Barnes stood there watching silently for almost seven minutes before continuing on his quest. "We should give him tap shoes or something, so we could hear him coming. Bell the cat."

"That's a really, really bad idea for so many reasons I'm not even gonna name any of them," Pepper tells him, perching on the edge of the desk and zooming the projection out again. "Letting him walk around and explore like this is real, solid, obvious evidence that we trust him, and don't you think that's important? Tracking him like this is kind of skeevy enough."

Tony flicks a few sliders on the image, and the rest of them show up too. Now the tower is an interlacing knot of trails in different colors. "Everybody's tracked, all the time, by everything. Your phone has one of those how-far-did-I-walk-today apps on it, right? Tells you where you went and offers suggestions for places you might have visited along the way."

"...Touché," says Pepper, after a moment, with a look of distaste at her phone. "Take everyone out but him and Steve."

His fingers move deftly. A red trail and a blue trail remain in the ghostly tower. "Here's the infirmary. Rogers hasn't been sleeping anywhere else since they got here. Here's Barnes on his fact-finding missions--there's Bruce's lab, yeah, that's the examination, twenty minutes in the same place; then he's back here at the infirmary and doesn't move for several hours. Here's him wandering around looking over Nat's and Clint's shoulders. Here's...him staying very still in the corridor for some reason for like ten minutes, that looks like it's happened a couple times. Just sort of stops and stays where he is, and then goes on."

"Where is he now?"

Tony scrolls the recording forward. "Been out to the kitchen very briefly a couple times and back to the infirmary. I think until he's actually officially told he's bedding down elsewhere, that's home base. Shitty it may be, but at least he knows it's a place he is supposed to be, and therefore on some level defensible..." He trails off. Since when did he get all psychoanalytic about this kind of shit? "And here's Rogers come to join him."

He tells JARVIS to replay their movements. 

~

_It was cold, icy floor tiles in stone and terrazzo and glass under his bare feet, coldness drawing the heat of his body away into itself little by little. That at least was familiar. Almost welcome. Now that he could reliably stand and walk without needing to lean against a wall for support, the need to explore his surroundings--to know what this place was and what things were in it, how many people, where were they, what were they doing--was overpowering; he didn't try to fight it. He went wandering._

_He had been in places like this before, that he was sure about. Although then his feet had made no sound on the floor tile because he was in jump boots, and instead of wearing soft grey sweatpants and a t-shirt advertising (for some reason) a German airship, he'd been in black combat gear, bristling with weapons, the mask familiar and comforting in its tightness against his face. Sometimes there had been men in black there with him, sometimes he had been alone and instructed to report to a rendezvous point for extraction once the mission was complete. Once, though, he had failed to report for extraction--_

_\--no, that wasn't on the list of Allowed Thoughts right now, and he had to stop and lean against the wall, slide down it with his eyes squinched shut and his body pressing tight away from the open space of the hallway, had to curl up in as small a space as possible and wait for his thundering heart to slow again and the panicky tightness in his chest to let go. He knew now that there were ways to stop the freakouts, or ameliorate them. That was a little thing, but he was objectively aware that it was, in fact, pretty fucking important._

_After fifteen minutes huddled in a tight curled knot in an alcove he cautiously unwound himself, and when this did not cause further horrors hauled himself to his feet and continued his exploration. He'd lost all sense of time, and as the tower's AI lit up corridors as needed for people traversing them, it didn't really register that it was three in the morning when he looked into Tony Stark's lab and saw his own arm hovering blue and ghostlike in midair. Or that three in the morning was a weird time for anybody to be doing anything other than sleeping._

_Stark noticed him, and he'd been absolutely sure he'd made no noise. Stark said things he didn't pay attention to. He could see in the lines of the man's back that he was afraid, and that almost made him huddle again because it was both satisfying and frightening. Still, curiosity over the arm won out, and he crept closer and closer, constantly assessing and reassessing the situation, until finally he was standing just behind and to Stark's left. The music playing was hard to think clearly through._

_There were bruises in the shape of fingers printed on Stark's neck. He looked at them, made himself recall the yielding strength of tendon and muscle in his grip, made his left hand uncurl and lie open against his leg. Stark said nothing._

_He pointed out where the arm was malfunctioning, expecting to touch something--that gently rotating model had looked so real--and his fingertip went right through thin air. Stark talked too much and waved his hands and asked questions about the arm--which he found he could answer without hunching--and showed him a sample of a new metal. Which they planned to...use for...his new arm._

__Why? _he asked. It felt as if he was asking_ why _all the time now._

_Stark's explanation made no sense, and he wanted to point this out, but he didn't have the words right then--and besides, he was awfully tired. It was too fascinating watching the translucent glowing model turn and move and grow and shrink as Stark played with it. Then he found himself sitting down, weight taken off his increasingly shaky legs. That felt ridiculously nice. So did holding a cup of something scalding-hot and bitter between his palms. He was aware of the stuff warming him from the inside out, pushing back the chill of bare feet on stone tiles, of years of frost-cracked memory, of something he was beginning to think might be defined as loneliness._

_The man with glasses again. Doctor Banner. Brisk and sympathetic. He was almost sure Banner would not pull off his face to reveal Zola's underneath, although why that particular mental image should surface was beyond him. The glasses weren't round, anyway._ Right, well, you're obviously doing better. Temperature's consistently down, much less difficulty with your breathing, saturation's up to just below normal, which probably doesn't signify much for you; let's get another look at what your lungs are up to and I think we can probably dispense with the enforced infirmary bed rest. __

_He wasn't sure what Banner expected. Doctors didn't talk to you, they talked at you._ Okay? __

__I think you'll feel less uncomfortable in a bed that isn't surrounded with equipment. In the meantime, walking about is entirely indicated as soon as the patient, that's you, feels up to it. Just don't be surprised if JARVIS says you're not cleared to enter bits of the tower, some of them are just for Stark's eyes only. _Banner smiled, a crinkly warm expression that some faint shred of him wanted to return._

_Steve was unhappy and he didn't like that but he didn't know what to do about it, and he was sort of getting the idea that being around him was one of the reasons Steve was unhappy. Everyone else seemed to think that being around him ought to do just the opposite, as far as he could tell, which wasn't very._

_(Why couldn't he think of himself, consistently, with a name?)_

~

"Buck?" Tentative, small. "Bucky, uh, they say you can move out of this place now. To a real room. If you wanted."

"Yes," he says, because Steve needs a response, he looks even tenser and more unhappy if he doesn't get one, that much has become clear. 

"Do you wanna go look at the rooms you could stay in?"

Shrug. "Sure." He wants Steve to stop looking like that, and has no earthly idea how to make this happen. The bruises don't help either. He can remember giving them, at least two of them. Barton was responsible for one. That thought wakes something in his chest other than tired soreness, and he steps closer instinctively to Steve.

There's almost a flinch, but then immediately Steve's big hand is cupped round his shoulder. For a moment it feels as if Steve's going to pull him into a hug, and he wants that, wants it badly, wants the physical envelopment and pressure, but not if it's going to make his oldest friend look like a kicked puppy. He just stands still, and the hand is quickly removed. 

_Did something wrong_ , he thinks. _Again._

Steve takes him through the corridors he now has mapped vaguely in his mind. He knows that along _there_ is the kitchen and lounge area and over _there_ is where sometimes he has listened to, but not watched, people sparring. He is led to a hallway with several ridiculously sumptuous rooms facing south, toward the tip of Manhattan. Steve is standing awkwardly at parade rest. "Uh, go ahead and pick?"

"Which one do you want?" he asks, a simple and straightforward question which makes Steve go bright horrible pink for a moment and then back to bruise-mottled pale. "--Steve?"

The pink rises again at the sound of his name. "Nothing, I'm fine, uh--"

He remembers now that Steve had always been a terrible liar. "What is it?"

"Just the...the others thought I'd be rooming with you, seemed to assume it was a foregone conclusion, but...obviously we don't have to if you'd rather not..."

"Steve," he says again, and is a little horrified to recognize the expression associated with trying super hard to hold back tears. He hasn't seen that on those features in...a very long time. "Steve." At least he is sure of that name, amid everything else, a little rock to hang on to while the confusion pours over and through and around him.

"Huh?" Oh, God, he really does look miserable. They'd better get this over with, and not in the hallway, anyone could walk past. He picks the middle of the three rooms, grabs Steve Rogers by the arm, and tugs him inside. And shuts the door. 

"Fuck's sake, Steve, what's wrong?" He thinks, rephrases. It feels like slogging through thigh-deep mud. "Which of the many godawful things that are wrong is currently being wrong?" The dimly recalled mountainous nuns of his childhood would have whapped him across the knuckles with a ruler for constructing such a sentence. 

Steve is hugging himself. Bucky is very, very aware of the physical dimensions and volume of Steve Rogers right now, how real and tangible and rumply and unshaven he is and...and he just blinked and now his lashes are sort of darker than usual with tears and kind of swept together in points, and the corners of his mouth are tight and his eyebrows are anxiously drawn together...

...did he just think of himself as _Bucky?_ It slides back into place with surprising ease, but he doesn't know how to say all the other things he needs to know how to say. Maybe he doesn't really need to after all. "Listen...it's fine if you don't wanna share a room. Looks to me like Stark has enough for everyone to have a damn suite. Don't...don't worry about it?"

Again it's apparently the wrong thing to say because Steve is trying even more obviously to hold back tears, and abruptly they're back in Brooklyn because Bucky says something unprintable and propels him over to the bed, and makes him sit down, and puts an arm round his shoulders exactly the way he always had when Stevie was unhappy or sick or scared about the future. The fact that he's now trying to comfort someone who has several inches and pounds on him instead of a scrawny kid Bucky could lift over his head without much effort suddenly doesn't seem to signify: there's that doubling effect only briefly, fading back out into a year improbably claimed to be 2014. And Steve turns to him blindly, the same instinctive miserable gesture as all those years ago, and Bucky holds him tight, rubbing his back while he sobs.

Taking Steve's weight in his arms hurts the damaged connections between metal and bone. He doesn't care. He strokes the dark-gold hair, the nape of Steve's neck. From somewhere dumb but unstoppable platitudes rise to the surface of his mind: it's okay, it's okay, everything's gonna be fine, you'll never have to face the world alone, I've got you. I am with you. I have you. _I won't let you fall._

Past and present suddenly align like filings in a radio coherer, and a signal flashes across and is received. Something Bucky has never fully understood, or possibly allowed himself to understand, is now brought out into the light of full awareness. "Oh," he says, soft, the voice of a man making a wonderful and frightening discovery. "Oh." And he pulls back from Steve enough to take his face between his mismatched hands, looks him firmly in the eyes, and kisses him. 

Bucky admittedly has had a great deal more practice at this than Steve, and also Steve's been hit in the mouth fairly recently and is not exactly at his stellar best when it comes to Romantic Gestures in the first place, but as a first kiss it could have been a great deal worse. Bucky lets him go, gently, after a moment, and considers the poleaxed expression on his features for a moment--an inexplicably warm, delightful, _human_ moment--before kissing him again. This time Steve tries inexpertly to respond in kind. His hands slide up Bucky's chest over the thin shirt, tracing over muscle and metal, and then Bucky feels fingers gently running through his hair and is suddenly amazingly glad he hasn't cut it. There are so many things he would like to be able to think, just now, but his limited capacity for independent thought has failed with a sizzle like an ionization chamber saturating: no more, we're full up, offline, no further input accepted.

JARVIS has the most polite and tiny artificial cough imaginable, but somehow--with a well-developed sense of comic timing--it still does seem to penetrate through the haze behind Bucky's eyes, and he sighs, resting his forehead against Steve's. "Nnh?"

"I do apologize for the interruption, sirs, but Mr. Stark is planning a formal dinner for this evening and has instructed me to ask whether Mr. Rogers and Mr. Barnes will be joining the household."

"Depends," Steve mumbles. "What's for dinner?"

"I believe he plans to serve--ah, yes, fondue."


	8. Chapter 8

_there go the last alibis_  
 _gone on the breeze_  
 _gone with the comfortable lies_  
 _we loved to believe_  
\--Tony Carey, _Saw a Satellite_

Steve had known something like this would happen, because there was logically no way it could _not_ happen eventually, but he had hoped Bucky would be granted a little more time to heal, a little more time to regrow defenses and coping mechanisms, before it did. 

He could really have done without the density of silence that fell over the dinner table after the explanation of the fondue joke and Bucky's subsequent abrupt statement regarding Stark's parents. Steve thinks it is probably possible to machine solid objects out of that silence, stack it up in little bricks, build walls with it. 

_Howard Stark. Howard and Maria Stark._

_What about them?_ Tony asked.

_They were a mission,_ Bucky said, and then, the syllables so heavy they were difficult to get out, _My mission._

And there it was, a moment out of time, the first of the returning memories to have real barbs in its tail. Across the table Tony was, for once and briefly, speechless; Pepper gasped; and both Natasha and Clint made little stifled movements forward, as if something had physically nudged them. Steve could hear his own heartbeat for the space of eight silent seconds.

_I'm sorry, I--_ and Bucky pushed back his chair hard enough to topple it over, staggered away from the table, hand pressed to his mouth, and ran from the room. 

The rest of them were on their feet. Steve could see the headline as clearly as if it was projected in the air by one of Tony's computers: HOWARD AND MARIA STARK DIE IN CAR ACCIDENT ON LONG ISLAND. December, 1991. _Tony,_ Pepper said. _Tony..._

_Sonofa_ bitch, Tony said, soft and wondering, and that broke whatever paralysis had been holding Steve. He tried to say something to the others at the table, failed completely to find anything even remotely appropriate, and just hurried after Bucky. He'd known _something_ like this had to happen, but so soon, so very soon after Bucky had come back to him, it wasn't fair, it wasn't _fair_...

_Since when has the world been fair,_ he thinks now, knocking for the fourth time on the bathroom door, asking the stupid question everybody asks in this circumstance: "Bucky, are you all right?" 

" _No_ ," says the door. He tries the handle: locked.

"Come on, let me in, please, Buck..."

"Leave me _alone_ ," the damp voice from inside snarls. "Go away--" 

It's interrupted by the sounds of violent sickness. Steve winces. Apart from everything else, Bucky's ribs are still healing, and this has to be quite astonishingly painful. 

 

"Please," he says again when the noises subside. "Bucky, let me help--"

" _You can't._ " It's like a whip, like a snake striking. "No one can. Go _away._ "

"It wasn't you. None of the missions was you. They just...you can't blame yourself for what they made your body do." His throat is thick with misery, and still Steve is aware of the absurdity of holding this conversation with a locked door. Only, he knows that Bucky _can_ blame himself; that if he were in Bucky's place he would be doing the same goddamn thing, logic or no logic. Because to think otherwise is to accept the idea of truly lacking agency, of being completely and utterly under outside control, to deny the existence of a self. To be a thing, used as a weapon and put away when not required. Once responsibility is given up, can it ever really be reclaimed?

Silence from the door. Steve rests his forehead against the cool wood, closes his eyes. "Bucky," he says. "Please."

It feels like an age goes by before he hears shuffling movement on the other side, and the click of the lock releasing. It's very loud in the density of this silence. Slowly he turns the knob, opens the door, aware that _agency_ is at a premium for Bucky just at the moment and not wanting to coerce him into interaction--and at the same time desperate, so desperate to help.

He's huddled in the space between the toilet and the bathtub, as compact and small as he can make himself; his face is pressed against his drawn-up knees, and the metal arm is protectively wrapped over his head. Steve can recognize a shield when he sees one. Bucky is shivering violently, as if he's freezing, as if the mild air is killing-cold. 

Steve closes the door behind him, slides slowly down to sit on the floor. He knows he must have slept a decent amount in the past seventy-two hours, but it doesn't feel that way. He leans his head back against the wall, shuts his eyes for a moment. Just being there. 

"Buck," he says, after a little while. "Bucky."

Nothing. 

"Bucky, it wasn't _you_ \--"

"Yes. It was." Still curled in a knot, muffled. "I killed Howard and Maria Stark. The mission objective was to make it look like a car crash. To hint that alcohol might have been a factor." Steve doesn't know if he's aware that his voice changes subtly when he's describing these things: it flattens, takes on a very faint unplaceable accent. "The mission was concluded satisfactorily and the asset extracted according to plan."

"The asset," Steve says. "The Winter Soldier."

"Yes." 

"What...happened then?"

"Recalibration."

Steve is feeling more than a little sick himself. "How?"

"The chair. Asset was recalibrated and prepared for cryostasis."

_The chair_ , he makes himself think, deliberately, filing that away. "But you remember now?"

"Yes. Pieces."

He thinks of _A Tale of Two Cities_. 

_You know you are recalled to life?_   
_They tell me so._

_You can bear a little more light?_  
 _I must bear it, if you let it in._

Just an hour or so ago he'd been stroking his fingers through Bucky's hair, held close and safe in those arms that had always protected him. Steve had felt as if nothing could ever be wrong again, drowning in unexpected and magnificent happiness--the kind of happiness he had pretty much given up on a lifetime ago--astonished at being kissed, astonished at being allowed to kiss. He could remember always having been fascinated with the full curves of Bucky's lips. How his mouth had quirked up in that gleeful who-gives-a-fuck, you-only-live-once smile right before he did something particularly calculated to get them into trouble, and how the smile had softened and warmed when Bucky pointed it at him: _don't worry, Stevie, I got you, everything's gonna be fine._

Everything is not fine, and nothing will ever be fine again, no matter how clearly he recalls the planes and angles of his best friend's face from seventy years gone past. Steve opens his eyes again, and finds that Bucky has uncurled just enough to peer out at him from under the protective curve of his metal arm. 

"Tell me what you need," Steve says, quietly. "Tell me what I can do." Not _what to do_.

"I killed a lot of people."

"Yeah, you did. In the war. We all killed people, Buck." He thinks he has never felt quite so tired in his entire life. "You weren't in control for the assassinations, though. They made themselves a....a program that ran on you, like on a computer. That was what made the decisions, not you."

"I killed for Hydra."

"Something running through you killed for Hydra." God, he hopes he's not making things worse, he just doesn't _know_ what to do. He wishes Sam were here. Sam knows about this sort of thing. "Pretty sure you're not responsible for the Winter Soldier's missions."

Bucky is still looking at him from underneath the arm, but Steve thinks maybe he's uncurled a little more. He's stopped shivering, anyhow. 

"I'm dangerous," he says. "People shouldn't be around me."

"People should be allowed to make up their own minds about whether they want to be around you."

He can see Bucky wince as that one strikes home, but he's not letting go that easily. "What if it turns back on? What if it comes back?"

"Then we'll deal with it together," Steve says. "I'm not gonna leave you to bear this alone."

"You should."

"Too bad. You're stuck with me."

For a moment he can see Bucky relax a little, limbs loosening from their tight hunch, and then an almost visible _no_ crosses his face and he's curled up tight as a goddamn pillbug again and Steve is tired and hurting and scared and so far out of his depth he needs a dive watch and oh, hey, look at that, to quote Natasha, he just ran out of _can_. "Jesus Christ, Bucky," he says, violently. "I love you. Okay? I love you. I always did, I always have, ever since we were kids. You can tell me to leave and I will, if it's what you really want, but I'm never gonna stop loving you and trying as hard as I can to do anything to help. I failed you twice, I couldn't stop you falling and I didn't come to rescue you, I thought you were dead, Buck, I thought you were _dead_ so it wasn't really the hardest decision I ever made flying that goddamn plane into the ice. I'm not gonna fail you again. You _don't have to do this on your own_."

He reaches out across the space between them. Bucky stays precisely where he is, and something inside Steve's chest, something important, feels as if it is coming apart. _Grab my hand_ , he thinks, doubling again, back to a train in Austria, back to bone-deep chill. His eyes slide out of focus. A moment, another moment, and he is sure he's failed after all. 

And then cool slick metal touches his hand, hard fingers wrapping tight round his. He squeezes Bucky's hand tight enough to hurt his own, vision blurring with a film of tears. A moment later, Bucky's in his arms, and he lets out a breath he hadn't known he was holding, hugging him so tight for a moment that he hurts Bucky's ribs. "You don't hate me," Bucky says against his neck. "You know what I did and you don't hate me."

"I know what was done to you--"

"No," Bucky insists. "You know _what I did_."

"I know what you did," and Steve buries his face in Bucky's hair. 

~

 

"It makes sense," Tony says, some time later, having had sufficient time to calm down. "That Hydra wanted him out of the picture. It makes a lot of sense."

Pepper doesn't know what to say. He looks into his glass, swirls it so the ice cubes tinkle and clash. For a moment he looks very much like Howard Stark. 

"And I always wondered, about the car crash." Swirl, tinkle. He's looking through the bottom of the glass into a subtly different time. "He was a good driver. He was a _real_ good driver, and he never got behind the wheel trashed. He'd never put Mom at risk like that."

"The newspaper said they were going too fast and he lost control," she murmurs. 

"Yeah, exactly. Dad didn't _do_ that kind of shit. Sure, he came off as the kind of asshole who would. Put some serious effort into coming off as that kind of asshole. I know the feeling, believe me. Even back then I thought something wasn't right there."

There had been a great many things that weren't right, there. Tony swirls the drink again, sits down. Pepper moves to the arm of the sofa; after a moment her fingers disarrange the careful disaster of his hair, rub tiny circles down his neck. Now that the immediate shock of Barnes' revelation is over and Tony seems to be dealing with it, her concern for him is turning into something slightly different.

"JARVIS, what's the status Underbed-Red-wise?" He leans into the touch. "He in any shape to manage a really awkward conversation?"

"Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers are watching television, sir. Looney Tunes, to be specific. Neither are showing physiological signs of intense nervous excitement or emotional stress at the moment."

"Really? That's a first. Okay, well, I'll let them get on with period-appropriate entertainment, it's probably doing them some good. Don't stop doing that."

"Doing what, sir?"

"I was talking to Ms. Potts. Yes, right there, wow, that's intense." He's slid down sideways so his head is resting on her thigh, and looks up at her with wide dark eyes. "Did you already know that head rubs feel crazy good and just didn't tell me, or are we sharing a moment of discovery here? I like shared moments of discovery."

Pepper twitches the empty glass out of his hand and puts it somewhere out of the way, and _smiles_. 

~

 

_Déjà vu:_ Bucky Barnes stands in the doorway to Tony's lab, partly hiding behind the curtain of his hair. This time, however, he speaks first. 

"Can I talk to you?"

"We pride ourselves on our open door policy here at Stark Industries," Tony says, gesturing to the room in general. The thing gently turning in midair is not currently a schematic of anybody's arm: it's an expanded view of an atom from inside the nucleus. Particles gently drift through the air in glowing blue. "Pull up a workbench."

Bucky drifts over, arms wrapped round himself. He's taller than Stark--not by much, and not now, when he's hunching defensively, but he has a couple inches on him. "I remember it. The mission. Your...your parents."

"Yeah?"

"Not all the details. But enough."

"You don't happen to recall anything about specifically who called the hit?"

"No. That was decided before I was activated. It wasn't information necessary to complete the mission."

Tony nods, tapping a proton and sending the model of the nucleus gently spinning. "Figured."

Again the silence feels a whole lot denser than air. "Don't....why aren't...." Bucky stammers at last. 

"How come I'm not going all Inigo Montoya on you?" Tony helps him out, or would if that particular cultural reference had ever been part of the Winter Soldier's mission briefings. "I'm not actually sure myself. Except--well, first off, it wasn't you behind the wheel. Not as if being full of vengeful fury at you is gonna accomplish anything, when the guys who actually murdered my parents are still somewhere out there in the world. And for another thing, I always had a hard time imagining my old man being incompetent or wasted enough to total his car and get himself and Mom killed."

A couple of translucent quarks drift past his face, the blue light turning him into black and white. "I guess it's better to know what really happened, is all, even if what happened is pretty fucking terrible."

"You're letting me stay here," Bucky says, "now that you know what I did?"

"Sure looks that way, doesn't it?"

"I don't understand," and his voice is soft, almost talking to himself. Tony nods. 

"You know the interesting thing about the second law of thermodynamics, Sergeant Barnes?"

"Huh?"

"The interesting thing about the second law of thermodynamics is that it lends itself super readily to metaphor." He spins the model again, the particles moving in their measured dance. "It states, among other things, that it is impossible for heat to move from a colder to a warmer object without work being done; or, conversely, that unless work is done, heat will naturally always flow from a warmer to a colder object until the two have reached thermal equilibrium. It takes more effort to stay cold, Sergeant, than it does to warm up. If you are following the general thrust of my implied argument here."

He holds out his hand. Bucky looks from it to him to the glowing atom surrounding them, and back again; and, after a long moment, takes and holds the offered hand, for the second time tonight: warm, and human, and real.


	9. Chapter 9

_From a valley in the Rhineland_  
 _To the deserts of Iran_  
 _From a village they called Jonestown_  
 _To a meeting of the Klan_  
 _No one can know where the strangers will go_  
 _And oh, oh, oh you know_  
 _They'll always be there_  
 _They'll always be there_  
\--Tony Carey, _The Stranger_

~

He has never been good with words. Never really needed to be. Back when he'd been alive the first time, a shit-eating grin and a lack of inhibition had generally taken care of things, along with the occasional fistfight. Then there was the frozen chunk out of time, which he is finding with practice he is able to select and avoid, set aside so that he can briefly think. And now he isn't good with anything much, except glowering from behind the curtain of his hair, but he would _like_ to be, like to find the right words in the right order to say the things in his head the way Steve had put lines on paper to show the pictures in _his_ head when the world was younger. 

(He can remember watching the pencil-point drift and curve, skip and zigzag, as Steve drew. Watching the lines of faces, buildings, appearing. As if the paper were some milky opaque liquid, and they were rising to the surface. The intent, focused look on Steve's face as he made something out of nothing, and how much, how _much_ he had loved watching him draw.)

He wishes he could use words better because everything is strange, and he wants to acknowledge the strangenesses without sounding, let's face it, like a complete dumbass. Breakfast: everything has sugar in it. Sugar had been hard to come by in the war, and these cereals and bizarre flat not-really-pastry things are laced with it, packed with it, sweet enough to make him blink. Even coffee is weird now. He has seen coffeemakers in the future and they are at least recognizable as such, except the ones that sound like pressure-cookers going wrong--that had scared the shit out of him, the first time he'd heard an espresso machine--but the one in Stark's kitchen is a sort of plastic monolith that grumbles and pees at you when you push a button. You have to put these odd little sealed cup things into its head and blue lights glow and he isn't at all sure he thinks hazelnuts and coffee go together. 

Bucky is trying not to be obvious about any of this, because he can't help noticing how tired and worn Steve looks and every time he messes up something about Living in the Future it bothers Steve. And the others, Romanoff and Barton, don't look at him with _pity_ ; he can't bear that, but he can recognize grudging sympathy when he sees it, and that's just about okay. Nor do they seem to expect him to engage in conversation. He's just there. It's a relatively comfortable level of not-interacting, and he needs that, needs it badly right now. 

(He remembers the woman, too. Not exactly how or where or when, but he remembers that particular gaze in a shock-white face somewhere. He knows it will come back to him, and doesn't look forward to the memory.)

The others are off somewhere, except for Steve, who is sleeping in, and Stark, who's emerged from his lair and is messing with the coffee monolith. He's still not clear on why Stark's so excited about making him a new arm, but slowly Bucky's beginning to realize there's a lot about Stark he is never going to understand. He's completely irreverent and talks way too fast and takes almost nothing seriously and he and Steve rub one another the wrong way and he listens to music louder than Bucky thinks is comfortable and he's apparently saved the world more than once. He'd caught the end of a video on the internet, Stark giving a congressional hearing two V-signs. _I have successfully privatized world peace._

Bucky can imagine Howard Stark doing much the same thing. There's the same gleeful disregard for convention in the dark eyes, the same curiosity, the same inability to be still. 

He realizes he's been staring straight ahead for almost a minute without actually seeing anything in front of him, and that somebody is trying to get his attention without actually tapping him on the shoulder. They're all a little leery of touching him, which Bucky's glad for. He shakes himself, blinks his eyes back into focus, looks up. "Huh?"

"You ready for me to take a look at that?" Stark asks, nodding to his arm. Oh. Right. He'd agreed to the examination. "Doesn't have to be now." Stark's wearing a paisley dressing-gown that absolutely does not suit him, and Bucky thinks he's probably spent actual time making his hair do what it's doing.

"Yeah." He wants this over with. And maybe Stark can make it hurt less.

"Right this way." 

Bucky leaves his half-full coffee cup behind and trails after Stark. He's glad Steve isn't there because he knows perfectly well he's not doing good at the _not looking scared_ thing. 

Stark nods to a chair. It's not anything like _the chair_ , but he has a brief sick flicker of crosspatched memory and thinks he shouldn't have eaten quite so many sugar-frosted glucose bombs. He sits down. All around them are those projector things that send clear pictures floating through the air. Stark pulls over a rolling stool and wakes them up one by one with quick little gestures, snapping his fingers, bouncing a flat palm off his knuckles and shoving out a wave of light that turns itself into rectangular hovering screens. He has a collection of wires and couplings and pickups on the table beside the chair, and stops for a moment before actually touching Bucky's arm. 

"Not gonna hurt you, Red Scare," he says. "Promise. This might tingle, that's all. I'm gonna stick a bunch of pickups on the joints, find out what's going on in there. Spread your fingers out for me?"

Bucky makes himself take a deep breath, nods, holds out the hand. He can't feel minor changes in temperature, and his pressure sensitivity is totally unreliable, but even with his eyes shut he's aware of Stark's fingers deftly attaching sensors and taping them to the back of his fingers and thumb. It's his imagination that the fingertips feel warm. More sensors on his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder. 

Stark slides a smooth glass surface under his hands. "You play piano?"

He blinks. "...A long time ago."

"Kay, you remember any Rachmaninoff, this would be the time to wow the critics. Otherwise, type. I want to see how the fingers and forearm musculature work." There's a network of fine wires, like cobwebs, running from his arm to one of the black cubes that he thinks represents Stark's actual computers. "In your own time."

Bucky shuts his eyes, feeling his heart beating. He's aware of the sliding helpless feeling of one of the memory skips beginning, and then he's back in the hot shoe-polish-smelling church basement hall where Steve had done his afterschool activities because his mom worked and he kept losing his latchkey. Bucky is back all the way in that brown heat, listening to the radiators clank and groan, bored out of his skull because Steve is doing homework and he actually needs to let him get on with that; and then he's drifted over to the horrible plinky-plink upright piano against the wall, the one where middle C sticks and the veneer is coming off the keyboard cover in long strips they're not allowed to peel off but they always do anyway. He's sitting at the piano and the keys are under his fingers, and he closes his eyes again and lets the memory take over. 

(Tony watches, as notes stream away from his moving fingers, drops of cyan light hanging in space on a barely visible stave. It's not Rachmaninoff: it's ragtime. Dimly the notes can be heard, including the mistakes, but as Bucky goes on playing they smooth out, take on the jaunty casual brightness of a decent barroom piano.)

He's aware that his left hand is stiff and heavy, but for a little while it's working, for a little while the fingers do what he tells them to. When he reaches the end of the theme a second time, Bucky lets them go still, and the keys of the piano are once more a piece of flat dark glass, and he's back in a chair in Manhattan. He blinks at Stark, who applauds briefly. 

"Steve know you can do that? Because if not, you have got to let him know you can do that. Good job. Let's move on to the heavy lifting, I need to record how your brain talks to those muscle groups."

They start with small hand weights, then quickly move up. The limit here is not so much the metal arm itself, it's the fact that the metal arm is connected to his ordinary skeleton. In Stark's full-body metal suit the robotic actuators of the left arm have the stability and strength of metal on his right side to balance the load, to counteract the effect of the weight; all Bucky has is his human spine and his healing ribs, and the heavier the weights he's lifting with his left arm, the more strain is put on the points where metal and bone connect. He's trying not to pay attention to the way that particular sensation brings back another chair in a different space, the awful wrenching of stress-tests on the connections, but suddenly it's too much to handle and he can't breathe and in a second everything is going to start to hurt _really badly_ and--

\--and Stark grabs the bar and guides it back to the rack, takes his hands, holds them tight, pulls him out of the vault and back into the tower lab. He gasps, sweating, holding on tight to Stark's hands as the terror begins to subside. "You're okay, you're doing fine, Barnes," Stark is saying. "You're fine. Breathe, okay? Breathe with me. Good." He's holding Bucky's gaze intently, dark eyes under dark brows drawn together in concentration. "We're taking a break."

"I can do this," he grits out. 

"Yeah, I know you can. We're taking a break." 

Stark lets go, and he squashes an instant of wishing he hadn't, needing that touch to keep him grounded and real. To distract himself he looks up at all the things that are now populating the various screens around them: more models of his arm, what looks like...huh, a musical stave somewhere behind layers and layers of blue text and wireframe 3D graphics. The church basement flickers again in his mind. He can very clearly see Steve and the other kids doing their homework, bent intently over the paper, and wonders if anyone else there saw what he did: not just a skinny kid with a floppy haircut and a cough that wouldn't quit, but someone he'd go into battle for. 

(It had been like being drunk, actually going into battle. Just being able to turn his mind off, to know this was for Steve, this had always been for Steve, who was safe at home in Brooklyn: that everything Bucky did was to help make sure he _stayed_ safe. And the rest of the world, too, sure. That was just an afterthought.

And then waking out of delirious nightmares in Hydra's factory to find that familiar well-loved face on a very different body, pulling him upright, out of his restraints: horror, sick horror that Steve was _here_ in this place, and sheer gratitude to see him, and confusion because he was and wasn't the kid Bucky had knocked teeth out for: that had not been like being drunk at all. That had been like being abruptly, terribly sober with the clear memory of the night before presented to him on a platter: live with this.)

He closes his fists hard, _hard_ , and something in his left wrist pops audibly and Bucky can't help hissing in pain. Oh, god _damn_ it that hurts, two of his fingers won't uncurl properly and he can smell something like hot wiring, scorched insulation in the air. Instinctively he draws the wrist close against his chest, rubbing at it with his other hand, and has to hiss again because it is very, very hot, hot enough to hurt his skin. It's pointless to try to hide any of this because Stark's sensors are still in place. As he looks up through the hair, he can see red spots appearing on the models of his arm on the various screens. 

"Hold it, hold everything," Stark is saying, rolling back over to him. "The hell was that?" His snooty invisible butler is saying something about failure modes. Bucky squashes a stab of fear, hunching over, and Stark stops and looks at him, at the screens, at him again. "Looks like you just blew a whole bank of relays. My fault, Barnes. Shouldn't have made you push it."

He tries to say something along the lines of _I'm fine_ but words are not working very well just at the moment, it hurts, it _really hurts_. Involuntary pain-tears are blurring his vision. Stark curses, reaches out to one of the projections, enlarges it with a gesture. "Fuck. Okay, I'm gonna have to go in there, I can't get at the neural interface to stop it hurting you unless I open it up. You okay with that?"

No, he very much is _not_ okay with that, having anybody poke around with the arm's controls makes him fall almost immediately into the memory of the chair but ah Jesus Christ it's making him feel sick, he needs it to stop, needs the pain to stop, can't think through it. Stark leans in just enough to be able to look him in the eyes--not yet touching the broken arm, Bucky notices he isn't touching it. "You trust me?" he asks, quietly.

Flickers of the past several days chase one another past his closed eyes. Waking with Stark's throat gripped in his left hand. Waking again to hear that pursuit was called off. Listening to Stark and Banner talking, understanding maybe one word in ten. Stark raising a glass to the recovery of Sgt. Barnes, and immediately afterward _they were my mission_. Steeling himself to step again over the threshold into this room. _You know the interesting thing about the second law of thermodynamics?_ Hands taking his, holding them. All of it flashes past so quickly and brightly it leaves afterimages on his mind's eye. 

"Yeah," he croaks, and makes his hand uncurl as much as it will obey him. "Yeah, I do."

~

At some point Banner arrives and there's the cold pressure of a hypospray against his neck, and things go a little way away for a while. He's aware of lying down, not clamped into the chair, and instead of the steady insistent pain from his left wrist everything on that side feels heavy and numb as if it's gone to sleep. Now and then there are pinpricks of sensation, and the smell of solder and flux (taking him right back to building a crystal radio, as a kid, playing with his dad's soldering iron), and somewhere over his head they're talking. 

"--would you look at this, the fatigue microcracking's practically macro--"

"--electromechanical interface dates to about 1995--"

"--you know, we're still using Soyuz, they could do spacecraft design okay, so why is _this_ such a mess--"

"--amazed he's gone on this long, considering--"

"--not exactly one of Nature's whiners--"

"--doing really rather well adjusting, actually--"

"--hand me that three-eighths Gripley--"

Then even that's gone, for a little while. 

When he wakes up he's still lying down, but not on a table; after a moment he identifies his substrate as the sofa in Stark's lab. His left arm is wrapped in two places with some black soft rubbery material, the wrist in a lightweight brace. Moving the fingers works, a little to his surprise. His head is full of cotton-wool and there's that acid, heavy exhaustion that comes after pain, but actually moving the fingers doesn't hurt. 

"Take it easy," Stark says, out of his field of vision, and then appears--still in his horrific dressing-gown. "You're okay, Barnes. Got you fixed up for now, just don't put a lot of strain on the wrist. How you feeling?"

Bucky thinks, and then the general uneasiness in the vicinity of his stomach suddenly makes itself much more specific. He rolls over on his side, making the arm twinge. "I'm gonna--"

"Got you covered," Stark says, and there's a trash can _thank God_ precisely where he needs one. "Bruce said you might ralph." Hands steady him, hold his hair out of the way. This is the second time in twenty-four hours he's been violently ill, and his ribs are really making their displeasure known to him, but at least it doesn't last long. And he is never, ever, ever eating sugar bombs again.

Stark and Banner haven't _fixed_ him, it turns out, only replaced some of the components that have been stressed to breaking point and rewired some of the rest of the arm to ensure nothing else pops while they're in the process of designing and building Bucky's Mark Two. "It's a patch job," Stark says. "But it's a damn good patch job, cause I did it. Just take things easy, don't try lifting any small buildings. Bruce says you should rest, by the way."

He's okay with that. Going through excruciating pain is tiring, for some reason. It's a reaction he knows very well indeed. It feels as if some of the anxiety is missing, though, and that's maybe also due to Banner and his hyposprays. Bucky is _consummately_ okay with that. He leans on Stark all the way from the lab to the room he and Steve are apparently now sharing. 

Steve is still asleep, a deep sound sleep that he's very obviously needed for a while now. Careful not to wake him, Bucky crawls under the covers on the empty side of the bed and settles against the pillows. A moment later, Steve makes a vague _wsfgl_ noise and rolls over, flopping an arm over Bucky. He's heavy and warm with sleep, insistent, as he curls him close and rests his chin on top of Bucky's head: _you're not going anywhere, don't even think about leaving me again_. Held and cradled, his arm warming to Steve's blood-heat, the rhythm of Steve's heart washing through him, Bucky can feel another sliver of frozen uncertainty crack, and melt, and vanish altogether. He does not even notice, too far into sleep, when the fingers of his metal hand touch Steve's back in a small, gentle dance of notes, played on a keyboard seventy years lost and gone.

 

~

"This came in last night." 

Sam Wilson watches the two of them as they read the file, sitting on his couch. Nat's hair is just about long enough now to stay in a ponytail most of the time, but a couple long red locks have already made their escape. Both she and Barton are that particular kind of still that means they're paying very close attention. Neither look remotely as deadly as they, in fact, are. 

"Fury send you this?" Barton says after a few more moments, looking up. Sam nods. 

"Officially, OSI. He's not involved. Neither am I, of course, I just work at the VA." He hadn't told on Steve _immediately_ , just as he'd promised. He'd given them enough time to get safely settled in at Stark's place before putting things in motion, and his assumption that Stark could handle the situation had been well borne out. 

"Pulling the strings," Nat says. "Okay. What's OSI's plan?"

"Officially, they don't have one. Yet." He taps the file with a forefinger. "This is the first solid lead they've had on Hydra since shit went down. I'm not a spy, I don't know how y'all think or anything, but my impression is that they don't wanna move too quick and fuck anything up."

"And they don't have the numbers they're used to," says Barton. "Poke this head with a stick, who knows how many other heads are waiting to bite you in the ass. This can't be fact-finding, this has to be surgical."

Nat sets down the file. "Fact-finding, nothing. It's Hydra all right. This is Mayak."

"Yeah, that's what the file says, what's it mean?" Sam looks from her to Barton, sees his mouth tighten in acknowledgment. "What's Mayak?"

"One of the most heavily contaminated nuclear facilities in Russia. Since the fifties it's had a horrific track record for safety--in '57 there was an explosion that's still the third worst nuclear accident the world's ever had, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, and they didn't exactly clean up their act in the aftermath. You remember how long it took Banner to track down the Tesseract's gamma signature? This place would cover up any Tesseract activity like a concrete slab. If they're doing anything with Hydra-Tesseract technology, they're doing it here." 

She touches the map, briefly, pulls her finger away as if the word itself is contaminated. "I need to talk to Fury. I'm gonna need all the information he's got."

"You're not going in alone." Barton's voice is flat. 

"No," she says, casual. "No. I'm not."


	10. Chapter 10

_And the pieces of the puzzle_  
 _Fall right into place_  
 _In the ashes and the rubble_  
 _Lies a picture of his face_  
\--Tony Carey, _Good Little Soldiers_

 

Once Stark gets an idea in his head, it is _amazing_ how quickly things start to happen. Steve thinks, not for the first time, of just how proud Howard would be of his somewhat insufferable offspring, and wonders what Tony would have made of the setup Erskine and his father put together. Probably there would have been fewer vacuum tubes and more glowing blue lights and rock music, but the general idea might not change very much. 

He'd been angry and worried in about equal parts when Bucky recounted the experience of having his arm examined--the hell was Stark thinking, how could that _not_ set off flashbacks, what business did Stark have putting Bucky through that without _him_ there to hold his other hand--and then realized what he was doing. He'd had to go kill a punching bag afterward, but Steve had made himself just listen to what Bucky had to say, to let him tell it on his terms, not try to make him fit it into Steve's idea of how things ought to be. 

(That was the hardest thing, Sam had told him. You had to learn to listen, even if you wanted to break in and say things they already knew, like what happened to them shouldn't have happened to them. Your job was to hear the words they decided to say, or to write. And only after they were done, only then was your viewpoint on it of any weight at all.)

It seems to have turned a corner for him, anyway. Steve is surprised but pleased to see how much more easily he talks, how interacting with the others appears to be more natural and less of an anxious, exhausting chore. The fact that the arm and hand work better helps, of course. He thinks probably Bucky was so used to the diminished functionality that suddenly having it back to working order had come as a pleasant surprise. 

(He can remember being able to see the edges of things properly for the first time, reading letters on signs without effort, his astigmatism wiped away by the serum reshaping the lenses of his eyes. He'd said something to Peggy--Agent Carter--about trees having leaves, and she'd laughed a little, but it had seemed like such an astonishing revelation at the time. So had being able to breathe without effort, having the energy to run, the ability to...do pretty much everything he'd spent his life struggling with. But the edges, the clarity of vision, that one stands out to him.)

This morning he had woken up alone, and immediately started worrying--and been surprised and pleased to find Bucky already up and dressed and at the breakfast table, actually _talking_ to Stark and Banner. With gestures. Little ones, but they were definitely gestures. He'd stood watching from the doorway, not wanting to disturb them, until Bucky looked up and saw him, and had been stupidly happy to see the ghost of his old smile--even just for a moment. 

He hadn't wanted to get in the way, but Stark had called him over. "Hey, Cap. Want your design input on this."

"You hate my design input," he said without rancor, coming to join them. Stark had one of his black glass tablet things on the table amongst their breakfast plates, the screen dimmed. "You think red-white-and-blue with stars on is--what was it, dorky?" 

"You go around with a big metal target strapped on your back, Rogers, I just want to point that out. Literally a target. There is no way that thing could be more of a giant sign saying 'shoot me right here, win valuable prizes.' I'm not even gonna mention the little wings on the side of your head." Stark's voice had a smile in it. "Dumbass costume design issues aside, you're the actual artist with actual talent round here, what do you think of this?" He woke the tablet up, handed it to Steve. A schematic model took up almost all the screen.

It wasn't so very different from Bucky's current arm, at a casual glance: curves and planes made up of overlapping precisely shaped plates of metal capable of moving independently and locking into place--but where Bucky's arm was glaring chrome stained with that one red star, this was a duller starless finish and the shapes were more subtle, sophisticated. It looked...lighter, Steve thought, less like a burden. The fingertips were carefully sculpted--he zoomed in for a closer look without thinking about it, his own fingers used to these motions by now--and there was something odd about them that he couldn't quite identify. 

"It's beautiful," he said, because it was. 

"See? Hey, Jarvis, add "sculptor" to the list, we got billionaire genius playboy philanthropist world-saving superhero _and_ sculptor now. _Vanity Fair_ 's gonna want to do a spread, or they would if anyone was actually allowed to know about any of this. Man, secrecy harshes my awesome, it really does."

Banner was clearing away the breakfast things, and rolled his eyes. "We can tell. --Sergeant Barnes has been very helpful in the design process, Captain."

Bucky was hiding behind his hair, again--as usual--but when Steve sat down beside him, he scooted his chair closer to be able to lean against his shoulder. Steve put an arm round him. "You doing okay, Buck?"

A nod, and then "It's not gonna have that _fucking_ star."

That had been four days ago, days during which Clint and Natasha had been absent from the tower and Stark didn't leave his workshop/lab/lair. There were occasional bouts of cursing audible even through the thick glass doors, and sprays of welding sparks were sometimes visible, and JARVIS apologized politely to Mr. Stark's guests for the number of times he was instructed to play the entire oeuvre of AC/DC. 

Steve feels as if he's more frightened of the procedure Bucky is going to have to undergo than Bucky is himself. Each time he thinks of it, of the surgery, of all the things that could go wrong, of all the pain Bucky is going to have to go through, something like cold lead shot drops into his stomach. Yes, this needs to happen, but...he's only just found Bucky again. The idea of losing him is unbearable. Couldn't it wait just a little...?

When he is sure he's alone--Bucky's taking one of his remarkably lengthy showers--he calls Sam. Not expecting him to pick up. It's probably in the middle of his workday. When he does, in fact, answer on the third ring, Steve has no idea what to say.

"--Steve?" Sam is saying. "Cap? You there?"

"Yeah," he mutters. "Sorry. Uh."

Silence for a moment and then Sam's voice comes back, warm with understanding. _Bed's too soft, right?_ he thinks inanely. "How's he doing?" Sam asks. 

"Good. He's good. Well...I don't know. Maybe." Maybe he doesn't actually have a clue, because while everything is wonderful in the shared warm silence of their room at night, when nobody has to talk and all there is is holding and being held, sinking into sleep curled up around Bucky in a protective shield, things in the daytime still hurt. "He's mostly better, from the, the pneumonia, I mean. He remembers stuff. Not all of it, but...enough, I think? He's talking, lets people touch him. Stark is...Stark's making him a new arm."

"That's great," Sam says, and sounds like he means it. "That's a hell of a lot of progress in not much time. It's gonna _take_ time, though. You know that, right?"

"Of course I know that." It's sharper than he intended. Steve closes his eyes, feeling the cool glass of the phone screen against his cheekbone. The one that the Winter Soldier broke. "--Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just--"

"It's hard as hell. I know. You can't take it all on yourself, Steve, you gotta let the others help."

"I know," he says again. "He only just started remembering stuff, though. He's still so easily spooked, he's still got a cough, he's too thin, I just...the new arm, is it a good idea for him to go through major surgery this soon?"

"Dr. Banner's there, right? What does he say?"

"I guess he's okay with it, he and Stark and Bucky were all...designing the arm together, or something."

"Well, honestly, if Dr. Banner's on board with it I'm gonna say the medical aspect is probably under control. I don't think Banner's the type of guy who'd take unnecessary risks, like, with _anything_. At least when he's not in green mode."

"But...going under, the anesthesia, they're gonna have to do stuff to his spine..." He's picturing it, bright lamps, blue paper drapes, the shocking brightness of blood everywhere, and swallows hard. "What if something goes wrong? Shouldn't they wait until he's stronger?" 

He wishes like hell that Sam was actually here, that he could see Bucky and talk to him and _tell Steve what to do_ because he is having to make it up as he goes along and he is scared, so scared that he's doing everything all wrong. 

"You have to trust them," Sam says, "He wants this, right? He asked for them to do it?"

He'd asked Bucky that himself, after seeing the plans for the new arm: this is what you want, right, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, Stark and his neverending desire to interfere and tinker can go to hell if you don't want him messing with you: and Bucky had cut him off before he finished the sentence, _yes_. It was a bullet of a word, hissing and deadly, leaving Steve blinking. _I want this. I need this._

"Yes," Steve says. "He does."

"Then that's all she wrote, Cap. It's his recovery, not yours. You don't get to direct how it goes. Not your mission."

"I'm not-- I don't want-- I know it's not--" He sits down on the edge of the bed, chest aching. "Shit. I'm just...scared." Even in his own ears it sounds stupid. 

"I know you are, man. Course you are, and it sucks worse cause you aren't the one it's happening to, you can't bear it _for_ him. Nobody can."

"Sam," he says. "I don't know how to do this."

"Gonna let you in on a secret: None of us do. There's tips and tricks, stuff to avoid, techniques that can help, but it's not like there's a big old instruction manual anywhere that has all the answers. Just...you told me he's the kind you save, not the kind you stop, and I guess, so far, turns out you were right with that." Steve hears a sigh on the other end of the line. "You found him, you rescued him, got him safe. That was the easy part."

"At least then there was...something I could do," he says. "Something constructive. Now...I lost him once and I flew a plane headfirst into the ocean. Everything that happened in DC is like a bad dream, but I found him, I did find him, and I can't lose him again."

"I can't tell you what to do," Sam says, calm, but Steve can hear the sympathy in his voice. "All I can tell you is that what happens next is up to him, that you gotta trust Tony Stark and Bruce Banner to do their thing, that this is not all on you. And that it's okay to be scared. It's okay to be terrified, because frankly this is some heavy shit and I don't care if you _are_ Captain America, you're still human. You have just as much right to be freaked out and miserable and not-okay with this as anybody else does--and to ask for help."

Logically Steve knows this to be the case, but it sounds different coming from someone else. "...I guess you're right," he says, after a moment, eyes still shut. "I do need help."

"You always were a stubborn little punk, Stevie," says a different voice. Too late, Steve realizes he hasn't heard the drumming of the shower in some time. He turns to see Bucky standing in the doorway with his arms folded, damp hair tied back in a ponytail: all of his face is visible. "Like pulling teeth to get you to admit you needed _anything_ , even if it was obvious."

On the phone, Sam chuckles softly. "I'll talk to you later, Cap. Don't forget you got people to watch your six, okay? We're here." Then a click, and the dial tone. 

Steve slowly puts the phone down beside him on the bed. "How much did you hear?"

"Enough," Bucky says, detaching himself from the doorframe and coming over to sit on the edge of the bed beside him. "You can't fix me by wishful thinking, Steve."

"You don't need to be _fixed_ \--"

"Yeah. I do." He sighs. The plates along the arm shift and settle as he works his left hand, rubbing at the base of the thumb. "I'm pretty fuckin' significantly broken. I'm missing the majority of sixty years of my memory, and the shit I do recall is horrific. I wake up not knowing who I am, sometimes, or where, or when."

"Buck--"

"Shh." He stays where he is, not quite touching shoulders, not shaking his head to loose the hair from its tie and resume its convenient curtain aspect. He's looking at the floor. "There's stuff that can't be fixed. Not by you, not by anybody. Not even if they had the technology, the chair. I know that. It goes back to before you found me in the Hydra factory."

"You don't--" 

"I have to say this," biting off each word as if he's sinking his teeth into the folded leather of a belt, holding back screams. "I don't know how much more functioning I got right now so shut up and let me do it, okay?"

Steve swallows hard, hard, but just nods. 

"There's a lot about me you don't know. Kinda hope you'll never have to know. I only have bits of it--" the left hand is opening and closing, as if trying to grasp something slipping through his fingers--"but it's mine, even the parts I don't remember. And yeah, I don't look forward to having them put me under to get this thing out and the new one installed, pretty sure it's gonna be unpleasant for everybody, but I _need it to be done_. Getting rid of this, having it out of me, not touching it ever again. It's a murder weapon." Bucky pauses, still looking at the floor. "So's the rest of me, but at least I can...get rid of this souvenir."

Steve wants so badly to touch him, to do something, anything, and is paralyzed by miserable uncertainty. "The...the new arm," he says, leaving it hanging.

"It's gonna be another goddamn mechanical thing riveted into my bones but at least it's one that I had a hand in designing, that he's made to do what I want it to do rather than what somebody else wants it to do. Lighter, easier to deal with. The...the sensory equipment is better, too. He says I'll be able to feel texture and warmth and stuff."

He says nothing, looking at the gleaming metal forearm and wrist, wondering how much he _can_ feel and whether he has any control over that feedback. 

"So just...I know I can't tell you to quit worrying," Bucky says. "You never fuckin' stopped, ever, did you? I guess that's something we had in common back then, when we were kids."

"You never quit worrying about me. I know you went hungry all the time for me, Buck. I remember the time you got me those colored pencils for Christmas, and you had to work a lot of extra hours right around that time. More than usual." Steve is also looking at the floor. "I drew you but I never let you see because you looked so tired and that was there in the drawings. I drew that girl you always took dancing instead. I forget her name but I drew her for you and I gave you that as a pretty lousy belated Christmas gift." 

"Would have preferred a picture of you," Bucky says, simply. "But it was beautiful, cause you drew it, and, well, she was easy on the eyes. I just wanted you to have something better than a crappy old regular pencil to draw with. You did sunsets."

"I couldn't get them fast enough. The light changed so quickly I was always drawing the sky like it was ten minutes earlier." He runs a hand through his hair, aware that tears are not far off. "I didn't want to waste the pencils so I got pretty good at just sketching really quick."

He had worn that set of colored pencils down to nubs, so careful when he sharpened them, thinking before he laid down each line on the paper. It had taught him the value of capturing a view in his memory as completely and quickly as possible, training himself to recall how light attached itself to people, how the core of shadows had a paler reflected glow. Much, much later, reading books about it, he had realized how much he'd actually taught himself. The Payne's grey pencil was his favorite, and so he'd rationed out his use of it, making it last as long as possible; and when he did finally ship out with the USO instead of the army that tiny pencil nub had gone with him. Probably the remains of S.H.I.E.L.D. still had it in storage somewhere, if it wasn't in the damn Smithsonian. Everything suddenly seems stupid and tawdry.

"I can remember you," Bucky tells him, and Steve looks up. "Not all of it. Not all of anything. But I can remember you. How damn determined you were to enlist, and there I was drafted, I never wanted it in the first place but how could I ever tell you that? And there was the money, I needed to know that you'd have that at least when I bit it over in Germany, I never thought you'd make it past the board, I thought you'd stay home safe in Brooklyn and at least you'd get my pension cause I made you out as next of kin. I never thought I'd see you again, Stevie. Thought that night at the expo was pretty much gonna be it, until you showed up in Zola's factory a couple feet taller and built like a brick shithouse, and everything I knew kinda flew out the window."

Steve blinks at him. There's that familiar smile, worn now round the edges and inescapably sad, but it's still Bucky's smile. "You never..."

"Wanted to play soldiers? No. I didn't want to go get shot at. You were the brave one, Steve. Not me. You were the kid who never knew when to run away from a fight."

He remembers the night of the Expo, Bucky in his uniform, hat cocked sideways out of regulation, with that trademark grin curving his mouth. Bucky, perfect and beautiful, not meant for him. Bucky holding him close, tight, for one last moment, and then in the space of a few heartbeats passing out of his world and into another, more important one. At that moment he'd realized that absolutely nothing else mattered than being of use, being some tiny part of the effort that had enveloped and claimed Bucky, and he didn't know if Erskine's presence that night was fate or luck or blind helpless chance but more than ever he was grateful to the old man because what he'd done meant he, Steve, can now say to Bucky Barnes: "I love you."

"I know," Bucky says, and now finally he does move to close the gap between them, to put his bad arm round Steve's shoulders and cup his good hand to his cheek, thumb rasping gently over the little glitter-points of stubble caught in the light. He looks into Steve's face for a moment longer before deliberately leaning in to kiss him, slowly and calmly and thoroughly. "I love you too, Stevie, I always have. Couldn't say it, back then, but every time I brought you some dumb little present, or woke you up out of bad dreams, or held you when you were sick, I was trying to say it anyhow. Hell, I think every time I ran my mouth at all I was saying it."

Steve wants to say something but he can't breathe, chest suddenly as miserably tight as it had ever been back in the bad years. It's all in his head, he tells himself, the serum had dealt with the asthma, this is just psychosomatic but dear Christ he can't _breathe_ \--

Bucky curses, slides his metal hand down to rub firmly between his shoulderblades. "Shit, I'm sorry. Got you all worked up. You got a...a thing...for this?" He gestures awkwardly; the Winter Soldier hadn't been part of a world in which inhalers were commonplace. Steve shakes his head, but the touch and the sheer familiar comfort of Bucky's voice is helping. "C'mon, Stevie, breathe. With me."

He is trying, and finds that it is a lot easier to shut his eyes and lean against Bucky's shoulder and not try to think about anything other than the long-ago exercises some doctor or other had taught them. Taught Bucky, too, because he refused to leave him alone to be poked and prodded, and insisted that they tell him how to help Steve through this. The familiar instructions help calm him, as do the measured breathing exercises, and after a few minutes the awful constriction begins to let go. 

"Better?" Bucky asks, still rubbing, and he nods. "Just...I needed you to know that. Whatever happens I needed you to know that."

"Sam says it's up to you."

"Already made my decision. I'm gonna do this, gonna have them take this thing off and put Stark's version on and, well, if anything happens, it's not cause of Hydra, just shit luck. Just. Steve. If anything does happen?"

"Yeah?" he asks, dreading the question. 

"If anything does happen, it's nobody's fault. You got that? Don't you dare do anything stupid."

"How can I," he mumbles, eyes shut, wanting to shout or shake Bucky or just...he doesn't know what. He knows perfectly well if he loses Bucky again at this point he may not have the strength to handle it, and that he is being instructed that he must have that strength. "You took all the stupid with you the first time you left."

"Damn straight I did," Bucky says, and just sits there rubbing his back in those small familiar circles until JARVIS says they are ready for him in the laboratory if Sgt. Barnes is prepared to commence the procedure.

The last Steve sees of him is a little awkward wave, half-turned, as he passes through the doorway and is gone.


	11. Chapter 11

_the red door is standing open_  
 _as you wake from dreamless sleep_  
\--Tony Carey, _The Red Door_

It is the longest day Steve can remember, and some of his days have been significantly lengthy. 

He hadn't even realized he was pacing a rut in the floor when he walked into the only somewhat yielding obstacle of Natasha Romanoff, standing directly in front of him and placing her hands on his chest. "Captain. _Steve_ ," she said. "Come sit down." 

She hadn't added "you're driving everyone else nuts," because she hadn't needed to. Pepper was there, as was Clint Barton; he and Natasha had returned from their mysterious mission after the operation began, and had looked at one another and rather obviously agreed silently that whatever they had to tell the class could wait. Possibly because it was evident that Steve wouldn't have been able to listen to anything or anyone just at the moment. 

Dumbly he let her draw him over to one of Stark's sofas, sat down beside her. "It'll be okay," she said. "He's tough. He'll get through this."

He couldn't put the words together: _but who will he be if...when...he wakes up?_ Probably Nat could see it in his eyes, and she decided to let it go--but her small, hard hand had crept into his, and held it tight. 

Five hours after Stark and Banner began their work, Stark reappears. Steve is a little appalled at the sight of him: he thinks he has never seen a human being look quite that utterly exhausted before, even after battle. There are marks on his face from the surgical mask and his dark hair is damp with sweat. Brownish crescents of shadow huddle under each eye. Pepper says " _Tony!_ " and runs to him, and it is good she is as tall and strong as she is, because as she gets her arm round him, his knees give way for a moment and she has to keep him from stumbling. Steve has never seen him look more human, either, drooping against her. She hugs him fiercely. 

"What--" Steve says, unable to hold back the question. Stark holds up a hand: give me a minute. He seems to make a herculean effort and straightens up, lifts his head from Pepper's shoulder. 

"Complete success," he says. "Bruce is incredible. I've never seen anyone so good. Sent me up here to tell you." 

Barton, moving soundlessly, places a drink in his hand. Steve hadn't even noticed him get up and go to the bar. Stark blinks at the glass, at Barton, at the glass again, and tosses it off like medicine. "Jesus God I need about thirteen more of those."

"What you need is some rehydration and a proper rest," Pepper says firmly. "So does Bruce. Someone needs to spell him."

Steve is on his feet before she finishes the sentence, so desperate to _do_ something. He doesn't miss the look Nat and Barton shoot one another, but right now he doesn't care, he needs to see Bucky, he needs to know Stark's telling the truth, that it worked. 

"He looks pretty gross right now," Stark says. "Just warning you. He's fine. He's going to be fine. Just...don't expect rainbows and butterflies, Rogers."

Steve says something almost certainly not befitting his rank and public image, and makes for the stairs. 

~

He's restrained. No--not restrained, but connected to things. Full awareness is a long way away, at the surface of the darkness he's floating in. He is conscious of things in a vague abstract manner: that there is pressure on his face, round his nose and mouth, that the air he breathes has the cold canned taste of oxygen. The left side of his upper body is numb and useless, but he can feel pain waiting, flickers of heat-lightning here and there, patient and ready for him when he rises to meet them. 

This is not the chair. This is not the vault. This is somewhere else. 

He gives up on his body for the moment and forces his battered mind inward, reaching for awareness, detail, memory. It is cold, it is terribly cold and he is facing some kind of obstacle he can't quite make out but knows that he must not touch it; he must not touch it or there _will_ be pain, he will be made entirely out of pain. The ingrained response is strong. Very strong. It hurts even to make the effort to disobey--but, like many things that seem unbreakable at first, once the crack begins, it spreads _fast_. Not thawing, nothing so gentle: this is the creaking bone-breaking crack and snap of ice in frozen lakes. Cold rushes through him, around him, past him. His world is first dark, and then grey, and then suddenly the jagged clarity of glass-sharp ice.

He remembers everything. 

1945: blackness and the searing agony of sudden light and movement, the place where his arm had been a mass of cold fire. Voices, fingertips on his face. The sound of a saw spinning up, and then the smell of hot bone. Blackness again, and cold.

1954: awareness returning. The arm. Being told his mission. Entering West Berlin. Spending the evening among American and British servicemen. On the way back to the base a Jeep overturns, killing three soldiers. The crash is assumed to be a drunken accident and is not investigated. 

January 1955. He's in Cairo and the smell of smoke is acrid, stings the back of his throat. The United Nations Diplomatic Negotiation Team makes up some fraction of the smoke itself. The fire is reported accidental. 

May 1955. West Berlin. He's on a rooftop overlooking the streets, a rifle in his hands, sighting through the scope. He has had sniper training from two governments now. He breathes out, squeezes the trigger as the last of the air leaves him. Breathes in. NATO General James Keller, eliminated with prejudice. 

January 1956. Madripoor. Not his best work: he makes a mess. British Ambassador Dalton Graines is eliminated along with acceptable collateral damage. Madripoor authorities have no leads.

April 1956. Algeria. A black-and-white tiled bathroom floor. French Defense Minister Jacques Dupuy eliminated. Algerian Nationalist Movement is implicated in the killing. 

May 1956. He's on another rooftop, this time in Paris, with a shoulder-mounted launcher, waiting as the first of the vehicles approaches on the street below. This is not precision work. This is crude, but effective. The first rocket takes out the car and the first story of the buildings on either side. Exit the Algerian Peace Conference Envoy.

February 1957. Mexico City. This at least requires some subtlety, and he is to use a blade rather than a rocket launcher. He is just as effective. United States Colonel Jefferson Hart, eliminated. 

June 1957: reality has begun to slip, like skin from a corpse as it decays. He is not able to keep times straight in his head. Sometimes it is as if he is somebody else entirely, somebody with a name. He can almost remember people's faces, their voices. Somebody's voice once meant something to him, he is sure. The handlers have noticed his decrease in efficiency. After he attacks a fellow operative for reasons he's not sure of even as he is landing each blow, they interrogate him, and he would like to be able to give them answers because it would stop the pain, but he has no answers to give. Then cold, and dark. 

March, 1973. Waking hurts. He is confused. They tell him what he is and where he is to go and whom he is to kill, and how. They take him to...somewhere that is also familiar, and he completes the mission because that is what he is for, to complete missions, but after Senator Harry Baxter is found floating face-down in a swimming pool he _does not_ listen to the mechanical voice in his head that tells him to return for extraction, repeating it over and over. It hurts very badly at first not obeying that voice, but it seems to become easier with practice. 

He does not know his name. He does not know where he came from before he was here, or where he has been in the past years. He knows he has lost time, decades of time, and only infuriating flickers can be retrieved from that huge block of nothingness. The people speak strangely, the clothing is unfamiliar. It is only his training that helps him stay hidden as long as he does. He travels from Dallas to Chicago, from Chicago to New York, and it is in New York that he first really begins to get the sensation that he was truly once a person, a person who lived in this place and walked these streets under this sky. For two weeks he is a ghost. He moves in half-formed memories. Places come back to him, but not consistently. He spends twenty minutes staring up at an old building in Brooklyn, at a certain window, without knowing why. 

They find him in a flophouse on the Lower East Side. It takes many agents to subdue him and take him into custody. Then there is more pain and a wall of blankness, but even as he looks at it that blankness begins to take on the edges of shapes, forms. Heat, wavering mirages. The sound of voices raised in a high ululating call, a summons to prayer. Then blackness again. 

It's abruptly 1991, the guttering grey end of the year, and he has the crosshairs in his vision once again. A car is coming round a curve. A fancy car, an expensive car, and the man behind the wheel looks strangely familiar for just a moment. It's the last moment the man will have to breathe. 

Afterward, he thinks the handlers are worried about something larger. They talk in hushed voices while they prepare him for the tank. The shape of the world is changing. 

2009\. Odessa. The shape of the world has changed, but he is looking through another scope at another car's tires, and he never misses. With a scream of tortured rubber the car spins out of control, tumbles over the edge of a cliff. 

The red-haired woman and her passenger, his target, are alive. She is helping the engineer out of the ruined car, and she sees him, and knows what he is. She blocks his shot with her body. 

He breathes out, and squeezes the trigger with the last of his air. He does not wait to see if she will live; he knows he has achieved his objective, that the man behind her will not. 

Blackness.

The bridge. Searing light as he takes off the ruined goggles. It's the woman from Odessa. And then a tall, blond-haired man, who stares at him in amazement, and who says his name. 

All the blanks, filled in. 

"Bucky?"

He opens his eyes. It's difficult, but he makes the effort. The heat-lightning flickers around his left shoulder are steadier now, stronger, but he can feel the left arm as well--dimly, but there. That's good, he thinks. It worked. 

"Bucky?" says the voice again, and he turns his head on the pillows. For a moment he's slipping in time again. The man sitting beside the bed is somehow both a scrawny, determined kid and a huge broad-shouldered adult at the same time, but the teenager and the man share a face. It's a face he knows very well indeed. Better than he knows his own, really. 

He tries to say something, and finds his voice is a rusty croak and that his throat hurts like hell. Never mind that. "Steve," he rasps. "Steve, I remember it. I remember _all_ of it."

Steve goes visibly paler. "Take it easy, Buck," he says, "you're still coming out of the dope they gave you, just...just relax."

"I spent the last half century relaxing on ice in between being made to kill people. I'm done relaxing." Something beeping nearby sounds somewhat perturbed. There are footsteps outside the room. Steve is taking his hand, careful of the IV, babbling. " _Listen_ to me," he says with as much force as he can muster. "I remember everything. I _know where Hydra is._ "

"That's convenient," says another voice, and he works to lift his head off the pillows and look past Steve. Natasha Romanoff has her arms folded and is looking at him evenly. He can clearly remember, now, looking at that face through a scope. "Cause I'm pretty sure we just found out, too, and there's a whole bunch of its heads that need kicking. You in, Barnes?"

Bucky sits up, using both hands to do it without even realizing. His eyes are fixed on hers. " _I'm in._ "

"Good," says Natasha. "I like the new hardware, by the way. Looks good on you."

Only now does he look down at his left arm. It's not the heavy shiny metal he's used to. It's duller, and that goddamned red star is gone, but the real miracle is something he hadn't even noticed until right now, which is that he can feel textures. The softness of the sheet covering him is something he is now aware of bilaterally. 

He looks at the hand, peering at the fingertips. They are slightly rougher than the rest of the metal plating. The fact that he's just undergone major surgery is starting to make itself known, but he pushes the pain away. There's something he needs to do. "Steve?"

"Right here." 

Damn, Steve's got that pinched worried look on his face again, and Bucky doesn't have the wherewithal to deal with that right now. "Come round here on this side."

Without questioning, Steve does as he's asked, standing by the left side of the bed. Bucky reaches up, wincing, and is glad when he ducks his head down to make it easier. His new fingertips touch Steve's hair, slipping through its softness, and then drift down to his cheekbone. He pauses to trace its curve with his thumb. He can remember feeling this arch of bone crack beneath his fist, and makes himself look at the memory. Makes himself own it. 

Steve is holding perfectly still for him. Bucky takes his thumb away, cups his new hand to Steve's cheek, amazed that he can feel the warmth of his skin and the roughness of stubble. He lets out a breath he hadn't known he was holding, and lets his hand fall back to the bed. 

Steve's eyes are asking a question. He's so tired, still groggy from the anesthetic, and he's really starting to hurt, but he smiles up at him. "Quality control check. Tell Stark I owe him one. Definitely...time for an upgrade."

This time it's his left hand Steve is holding as Bucky drifts on a tide of painkillers, and this time the darkness holds no terrors he has not already met.


	12. Chapter 12

_There are many roads to travel_  
 _And many deeds to do_  
 _Knots to be unraveled_  
 _'Fore the darkness falls on you_  
\--Tony Carey, _Good Little Soldiers_

He moves differently now. 

Steve can't pinpoint exactly what has changed. With characteristically stubborn insistence Bucky had been up and about as soon as he could walk; Banner was appalled to find him in the gym instead of doing the low-impact physical therapy exercises he'd been prescribed. Steve was sure he'd seen a flush of green rise just for a moment in the doctor's face. But the healing factor--the serum, whatever it was that kept him going through a bout of pneumonia that would probably have killed an ordinary man--seems to have kicked into high gear; the surgical wounds are healing at an astonishing rate. And he moves differently. 

The Winter Soldier in action had been weirdly beautiful to watch, fighting with the smooth grace of total physical control. Steve remembers thinking--in that cold sharp split-second clarity that comes sometimes in the middle of battle--that the skill behind the knife tricks was incredible in its precision. There was no wasted motion, no unnecessary gesture: he'd been controlled, contained, efficient and cold. A weapon. 

At the end, in the Helicarrier, he was just a man again, his strange cold grace all gone. Now, Steve thinks, he has it back--but that's not right, is it? He has _something_ back, but it isn't that inhuman pitiless control. At first he thinks it's just compensation for the missing weight of the heavy Hydra-built arm, but that can't account for the overall change.

He finally understands what it is when he sees Bucky spar with Natasha. She is the first of them to offer, possibly because she is actually confident she can take him down if he goes into uncontrolled-flashback-murder mode, and possibly because of what Steve is witnessing now, the seamless match of fighting style between opponents that points inexorably to the shared origin of their skill. He's standing in the hall outside the gym, watching through the glass wall: twenty feet and a whole world away.

"Close your mouth, Rogers, you'll catch flies," Stark says beside him. Steve jumps; he's been too intent on the sparring match to realize he isn't the only one watching. He does, in fact, close his mouth with a snap. 

"They're dancing," he says. "That's not fighting, that's dancing."

"Same difference, only they don't have to wear uncomfortable clothes and listen to yet another rendition of the Blue Danube while they're doing it. I cannot clearly express in words how much I hate the Blue fucking Danube." Stark looks at him, consideringly. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," he says. It's an automatic response. "He was a good dancer, back...back then. Not great, but pretty good. I'd watch--sometimes he'd get his date to bring a friend along for me, double-dating, but when we got there I always found myself a handy wall to stick to while she went off to find a better partner. I can't dance."

Peggy had been going to teach him. Steve squashes that train of thought hurriedly. "But I watched him, is the point, and he was good. But that, what they're doing...that's incredible."

"Yup. Say what you like about the Commies, they're real good at highly specialized job skills training." His voice is flat. "Good timing, too, cause we just got a message from the great beyond telling us we're being mobilized in two days. Puttin' the band back together for real."

"'We'?"

"Yeah. Including Underbed Red. We're one down, and the one happens to be an actual god, so I think they're taking what they can get in terms of numbers. I don't know whose decision it was."

They've been trying to get in touch with Thor for days now, but so far every attempt has failed. Steve nods, and looks back to the sparring match just in time to see Natasha spring one of those fluid balletic throws that appear to defy gravity, landing on her feet after a complicated few seconds while Bucky sprawls on the mat. 

"How does she do that?" Stark inquires. "The rotation around what looks like at least two axes at right angles to each other. I mean, I've seen her do it a bunch of times and she can't, like, warp time and space or anything, so how the hell does it actually work?"

"I have no idea," he says, truthfully, watching them through the glass. Both of them are panting and sweaty, flushed with exertion. As he watches, Bucky takes Nat's offered hand as if to get up, and he is impressed with how quickly she reacts when he tries to yank her off balance. Instead of landing flat on her back she rolls, coming up on one knee, and Steve can tell she's ready to leap--but the intent focus in her expression dissolves into a grin, as Bucky raises his mismatched hands in surrender. Steve catches a glimpse of his face, and the answering smile is so close to Bucky's old familiar smirk that his chest tightens sharply. Because it _isn't_ that expression, not quite. 

He knows what the difference in Bucky's movement is, now, and it's that _Bucky_ , not the Soldier, is looking out from behind those eyes. Not cold and deadly machine-like control, but the trained dancer's grace of the new person Bucky has become. Like Natasha, he has taken the skills taught him by the unspeakable Red Room and is using them on his own terms, not those of his controllers.

Steve hopes he'll get the opportunity to get to know that person, because right now he's not at all sure he does.

"You sure you're okay? You look kind of peaky," Stark says, eyebrow raised. 

"I'm _fine_." He hadn't meant to snap. "...Sorry. Yeah. I'm good. Tell me what else they said, other than "two days."

Stark takes the change of subject without remark, and nods in the direction of his lab. "Step into my office and I'll show you our secret agent mission briefing. We should have a code phrase or something. The Eagle Has Not Landed Yet But Is Beginning Its Descent, Please Fasten Your Seatbelts."

Steve snickers despite himself. "Do you take _anything_ seriously?"

"No, it's bad for you. Upsets the humors. Well-known fact."

~

He has sat at the head of tables like this before. Granted, they hadn't been made out of black glass with glowing blue touchscreen displays built in, but the general effect was the same: all of the others, looking at him. Looking _to_ him. Before DC and the implosion of S.H.I.E.L.D. he had been, if not _happy_ about it, at least relatively sure of his own position and leadership capability. Now, with (most of) the Avengers arrayed round the table waiting for him to say something, Steve feels the fluttering distant edge of something like panic, and is appalled. This is the first time he has had to be Captain America since the Helicarriers fell. It is exactly as bad as the first time he had to put the tights on and sock Hitler on the jaw. 

These are his friends. His comrades. He has done this before: he can do it again. 

"Right," he says, and feels the flutter recede. "Here's how this is going to work. We leave the tower separately. Barton, you and Banner go first, then me, then Stark. Natasha, you're the best of us at not being seen; you get Bucky out last, and meet us at the rendezvous point. Coulson will be waiting with equipment, supplies, and our ride."

"Are we gonna be jumping out of airplanes?" Barton asks. 

"Yeah." He taps at the display in front of him, calling up a map of the area overlaid with the data Coulson had sent. "We'll come in from the north, circle round and drop in this area here to the east of the complex."

"Okay, but are you gonna wear a chute this time?" Barton looks solemnly down the table at him. Steve blinks. "Nat said that was a thing with you now. I just want to register my disapproval on behalf of those of us who don't bounce when they jump out of airplanes."

"You jumped without a _chute_?" Bucky demands.

"What I actually said was 'I think he did that to mess with Rumlow's head'," Natasha puts in. "The other thing is timing the jump to ensure he gets the last word in arguments."

"What? I don't do that." Steve looks from her to Barton to Stark, who is totally not managing to hide a snicker. " _He_ does that. Remember? 'I have a plan--attack!' and then he jumped out of the plane after Thor and Loki."

Stark grins."I still maintain it was a good line, and you set it up perfectly, Cap. Couldn't resist." 

"You _jumped_ without a _chute_?"

"It was over water. Let's talk about that when we're not in the middle of a mission briefing, okay? Yes, all of us will be wearing parachutes except Iron Man, who doesn't need one."

"Because his rocket boots run on pure ego?" Barton asks solemnly. 

"Hey, it's a sustainable form of energy, what can I say?"

"Focus, everybody," Steve says, not even noticing that the nasty little flutter under his ribcage is gone. "Like I said, our insertion point is here--" a tap of his finger lights up a sparsely wooded area--"and when we're on the ground we'll split up into teams. OSI has identified weak spots in their security perimeter here and here, and the main entrance is heavily guarded."

"What we're looking at is the whole Mayak complex," Natasha says. "The exclusion zone stretches for 250 km around the complex. According to our intelligence reports, the Hydra base is under this part of the plant site, but there's at least two back doors."

Bucky is looking closely at the map, and Steve notices how pale he is all of a sudden. "Buck?"

"Here," he says, and ghosts his new left fingertip over the schematic. The touchscreen responds almost as well as it would to his other hand. "The hidden entry to the Hydra base. This isn't a storage facility. It just looks like one."

Stark is quicker than either of them, his fingers practiced with the gestures that control his toys. He zooms in on the structure, which is marked _Fissile Material Storage Facility II._ It's not far from Fissile Material Storage Facility I. "That's the real one," he says, pointing. "How much do the guys running the above-ground complex actually know about this operation?"

"Only that it's a facility run by an official government department office at a higher security clearance. That's all they need to know."

"Workers aren't told much of anything, and administrators know better than to ask questions. It's a little better now than it was in the Soviet era, but not by much." Natasha shrugs. "They see people in nice suits, teams of workers, equipment coming and going, but as long as they have the right ID the site security people aren't encouraged to be curious about what's going on in their facility."

"Don't ask, don't tell?" Stark says, eyebrow raised. 

"Essentially," she says. "Barnes, once we're in, what are we going to be up against?" 

Bucky is still very pale, but his voice is steady and controlled. He doesn't know exactly what they'll encounter, but he tells them as much as he can about the way Hydra bases in his experience are laid out. He can remember seeing plans and schematics from time to time during his activations.

Steve can remember Fury talking about compartmentalization. He has had to learn how to do it, and is uncomfortably aware that it's become easier and easier with practice, but is glad right now of the ability to set his anxiety firmly into its own little box and focus his attention on the job at hand.

~

The drone of the Quinjet's engines is soporific. With his eyes closed, leaning back against the interior fuselage, the vibration buzzing in his bones short-circuits memory: it could be a month ago, seven decades back. Time undergoes liquefaction like soil shaken by earth tremors. If he opens his eyes now he might see the familiar well-loved faces of the Commandos; might see Peggy, all dark eyes and scarlet generous mouth. Might see Howard Stark, grinning that irrepressible fuck-the-world grin his son has inherited with interest.

They hit a pocket of turbulence; dropping suddenly, the plane shudders and steadies itself. Steve's head bangs against the wall. He blinks, and for a moment _isn't_ sure when he is: the face across from him is out of time. In the dimness all he can see clearly are the sharp lines of eyebrows and nose, dark hair, and close-fitting dark clothing that might be a navy-blue peacoat and might be black combat gear. Then the figure moves again, reaching for something, and the dull silver of its left hand catches his eye. 

Steve watches, without saying anything, as Bucky methodically attaches what looks like half OSI's collected armory to himself. He's in black tactical gear, not very different from what he'd worn in Hydra's employ, minus the mask and goggles. The left arm is concealed; the only metal on view is his fingertips. Black-bladed knives in quick-release sheaths are strapped to his back and legs, handguns in drop holsters secured to each thigh, a heavy webbing belt carrying spare clips and God knows what else in utility pouches clasped round his waist. Another knife slides into a forearm holster. He moves with unhurried efficiency. It's fascinating. 

It's also doing things to Steve's insides which are not exactly conducive to concentrating on the mission. Bucky clips a machine pistol to his back, then pulls his hair back out of his face and uses what Steve thinks has to be one of Natasha's hair elastics to secure it in a ponytail. Without the hair in the way he looks so _very_ much his old self that Steve absolutely cannot help staring, and Bucky looks up and meets his eyes. 

"What?" he asks. 

"Nothing." This isn't the cocky beautiful uniformed Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes he remembers so clearly from the night of the Expo in 1942, nor the wisecracking haunted sniper of the Howling Commandos, nor is it the Winter Soldier; this is somebody Steve does not know. Somebody dangerous, unpredictable, and breathtakingly compelling. 

"You're staring," Bucky says. 

"Sorry. Thinking about something else." 

Bucky seems about to inquire further, but just then--thank God--Stark asks him something about the arm, how it's responding, and Steve rubs at his face and leans back against the wall. After a couple of minutes Natasha comes back from peering out the cockpit windows and settles beside him. Their pilots know better than to comment.

"You okay to do this?" she asks, quietly enough that nobody else can hear over the drone of the engines. "Because if not, we need to know now."

"What?" He sits up, looks at her, aware of the sinking feeling that he knows _exactly_ what she's talking about. 

"Leading this job. You've been out of it for days, Steve, I know this whole thing has been rough on you--more than rough--but we're going to need your whole attention focused on the mission. Not on him."

"I..." he begins, rubbing at his face. 

"Either you're an asset or a liability. Which is it gonna be?"

He looks at her, then up the aisle at the others. He knows how much he owes them, each of them. Back in the beginning, back when he'd first found Bucky and hadn't had any idea what to do next, he'd remembered something from a book Sam had lent him: that there is a difference between _personal_ and _important_. Nobody had ever said that before, not in so many words, but he thinks part of him has always known it. Maybe not the part that defied direct orders and got him dropped behind enemy lines on an apparent suicide mission to rescue his best friend; but in that case the two had coincided. It's when they lead in different directions that the choice becomes apparent.

Personal is not the same as important--and now Steve remembers another thing he had learned, at some point between that night in 1942 and the present: _one can always do what one must_. Even if it is terrible. Especially if it is terrible. 

He takes a deep breath, feeling a tightness in his chest he'd barely noticed before letting go. "Yeah," he says, meeting Natasha's eyes. "Yes. I can do this."

She looks at him, eyes searching, and he has the uncomfortable feeling that she can read him very well indeed. After a moment, though, she nods. "Okay. We'll get in, do the job, and get out. Talking can happen later."

"We're gonna stop for frosty chocolate milkshakes on the way back, right?" Stark calls, having overheard the last of this. "I mean, that's part of the itinerary for this whole deal. Or donuts, I could be convinced to make do with donuts."

"Or shawarma?" Clint wants to know.

"We can maybe negotiate for shawarma."

~

The night air is icy cold, slamming against him as he falls, seeping almost immediately through his gear. It isn't the dark blue Captain America suit, or the one from the Smithsonian, the one he'd worn on the Helicarrier: he's in plain black, like the rest of them except Stark's red-and-gold. His shield has been coated with anti-reflective black, like Bucky's knives. It is the first time he has not worn, or carried, the star. Steve knows he's going to have to figure out how he feels about that, too, when this is finished. 

The jump is over almost too soon, and they're down, ditching the chutes and moving silently through the scrubby woodland toward the complex--visible now, security lights on the buildings, the faint sound of activity carrying through the still air. They split up. His apprehension, his nervous tension, have stretched and settled into something cold and hard-edged and strong, something Steve can use rather than fight against. Despite the chill, despite the stink of chemicals all around them as they approach their target, the danger they're walking into, he realizes he feels more alive--more _real_ , somehow--than he has in months. Since the collapse of Project Insight. Since before that, even. For the first time in ages, Steve Rogers knows exactly who it is he's fighting for. 

They reach cover without incident--either Mayak's security is half-assing it or they've been told to stay clear of the project building, because the only people guarding the rear of the structure where the vent tunnels emerge are a couple of men in dark military-style fatigues: Hydra goons. They're carrying an AK-47 apiece. 

Steve gives the others time, gets confirmation that they're in position, and then nods very slightly. Beside him Bucky barely moves, but suddenly--and silently--both Hydras crumple to the ground, the short hilt of a throwing-knife protruding from each throat. Just as silently Bucky slips out of cover and crosses to the building, kneeling to retrieve his knives, and is briefly busy with the grating over the vent duct. A dark gap appears at one side, and grows, wide enough to admit a body. Bucky stands back and gives him the signal, and one by one Natasha and Barton, and finally Steve himself, creep across the open ground and climb inside the duct. 

~

Afterward he finds he only has flashes of memory, snapshots, film frames, as if seeing the whole fight through the stuttering light of a strobe. He doesn't know why they don't all fit together, why his recollections aren't continuous, and until he talks to Sam Wilson again he won't understand that there is a reason. First creeping through the ductwork, careful not to make a sound; then hearing the distant roar that indicates Dr. Banner and his colleague Mr. Stark have made their entrance to the scene, and the instant shriek and wail of alarm klaxons, the pounding of booted feet as the Hydras run to meet the attack; then, with that element of the mission proceeding as planned, the four of them spreading out in order to do as much damage as they possibly can. They have the basic layout of this place memorized, but not the individual passageways and rooms; OSI's intel and Bucky's memories hadn't allowed for that level of detail. It is so strange, Steve thinks, to be running through a place he recognizes only from two-dimensional maps. 

Memory begins to splinter there. He has a bad moment when he finds himself looking down over the main weapons production floor, that blue unnatural glow everywhere: it's 1943 all over again, and he's just freed Bucky from Zola's shackles, back before everything, back before the freeze and thaw. It only lasts a few heartbeats, though, before training and instinct take over. He jumps. 

Time slows down: he hangs in the air and can see everything slow and clear beneath him, almost leisurely deciding how best to deal with the Hydras running the machines. The dead-black shield flies just as straight and true as it ever did in its patriotic livery, feels just as right on his arm as it always has. He can do this. He does.

There's one of those blank flickers, like a jumpcut in his memory, and now the production hall is littered with crumpled bodies in Hydra uniform, and the small red eyes of explosive-charge telltales watch him steadily from the machines as he climbs back up to the catwalk he had leapt from. His shield is on his back; his knuckles hurt. So does something in his side, and something in his knee. None of that matters in the least. What does matter is his name, which is suddenly there in his ear, in the comlink. Barton. "--Cap? Rogers, status report, c'mon, where the hell are you?"

"Rogers," he says. "North production floor's set and armed. What's your status?"

"I'm with Romanoff, we're in the hangar bay, to the west of you. Stark and Banner secured the main entrance, they're on their way--can I suggest you maybe get your terrifying buddy to quit making Hydra sashimi, set his goddamn charges, and join the group so we can all _get the fuck out of here_?"

"Acknowledged," he says. "I'm on my way. Rogers out."

He knows which way Bucky went, because of the bodies. Bucky isn't answering his comm, and Steve doesn't know whether that means he's busy or that he's down: either way, he hurries. They're in a part of the base with carpet now, and the walls aren't bare concrete and steel. Ah, he thinks. The administrative section. Where the base commander is to be found. 

Here and there Steve recognizes more of the little red unblinking eyes. Individually, each explosive charge isn't all that powerful. Placed strategically and detonated all at once, they are capable of turning this entire underground warren into a sunken crater in the earth. 

He's jogging, now, the shield on his arm at the ready, instinct telling him that time is running short. There are voices up ahead. Another stutter-flash and he is looking round a corner into what used to be quite a nice office. All of the computer monitors are dead, some of them still with a knife lodged in the remains of the screen. Four men in Hydra security uniform are draped over the shattered furniture, slowly turning the grey carpet dark and sticky red. And James Buchanan Barnes is standing in the middle of the room, holding a fifth man dangling by the throat. His hair has mostly come out of its ponytail, and the left sleeve of his fatigues is shredded, the metal beneath showing through. 

The man he's holding has commander's insignia on his uniform and is going from reddish-purple to bluish-purple in the face, ineffectively clawing at the metal hand clamped round his neck. Steve registers all of this in the space of a few heartbeats, and then it feels as if his heart has stopped beating altogether, because suddenly another little red eye is watching him. This one is sitting squarely on the back of Bucky's head. 

He does not think at all: it is not his mind that sends his two hundred and forty pounds forward, that guides his muscles as they bunch and heave him off the ground in a leap that clears the wreckage of the furniture. His outstretched hands hit Bucky squarely between the shoulders, drive the breath from his lungs, sending him and the commander toppling to the ground. For a moment Steve thinks he is too late, that the shot found its original mark--and then something like an iron girder hits him in the back. 

It doesn't hurt. It shocks him numb, the way a blow to the arm makes you drop what you're holding. He is no longer leaping but falling, but he doesn't mind. The edges of everything have gone soft and black, shadows spreading through his vision. Dimly he is aware of hearing somebody shout, hearing another gunshot, but he can't do anything about that. He's done. 

He does not feel it when he hits the ground.


	13. Chapter 13

_Cause danger rides on the wind tonight_  
 _And reason flickers like candlelight_  
 _So look up to the sky and wish for luck_  
\--Tony Carey, _One Star Falling_

 

Learning to trust himself was going to take a very, very long time. 

It's as if he'd spent the years of his captivity and usage inside a machine, aware of the things that it did without being able to direct and determine those things--and now he is still inside the machine, but the controls are unlocked. He has to re-learn how to make it work, because there is nothing _but_ him in there now. He's alone inside the cockpit of his own head. 

His body remembers everything, however. As soon as he'd healed enough to use it, he'd put the arm through its paces, surprised and pleased at how light and responsive it was. Working out on his own was helpful in reasserting his control and agency, but he wasn't sure of his speed and skill when matched against an opponent. Bucky was very, very grateful to Natasha for volunteering. Awkward at first, he had found it easier and easier to relax into his training and instinct. 

She'd known as well as he had that he was deliberately pushing himself. Pushing those trained responses, leaning on everything that would trigger any remaining conditioning, anything that would draw out buried protocols and take over control from his conscious mind. "You're not going to," Nat told him, after one of their bouts.

"Not going to what?"

"Snap into murdermode. I know, it's so difficult to believe at first, that nothing's still lurking in there with you. It takes time to be able to trust yourself again."

"I hope you're right," he said. In the brightly lit, familiar surroundings of Stark's gym, her confidence had seemed eminently believable. 

He's not in that friendly place right now. 

He's lying flat on his back in the remains of a Hydra base, and Steve Rogers is crumpled on the floor beside him, containing a bullet that was intended to blow Bucky's head off. 

Everything has gone so slow, so still and so clear, black and white, as if he's in ice again, as if ice is what he is made of. He watches his right hand, which is his own, swing up; watches the gunsights line up on the face of the sniper, watches that face disintegrate in a dark cloud beyond the muzzle flash. 

Color and sound and time all come back in a rush. He can hear his own heartbeat roaring in his ears even through the ringing of the gun's report. Bucky gets to his hands and knees. Bends over Steve. He can feel the warm wetness of blood with the fingers of his left hand as he turns Steve over. The bullet wound is high on the left side of his back, too high for the heart, thank God, but Bucky thinks it's in his lung. 

"Fuck, Steve," he breathes. "Stevie, you hang on, you fucking _stay_ with me, you hear?"

The white, closed face doesn't change--and then he thinks Steve smiles a little, a ghost of that dimply curved smile he remembers from Brooklyn, a lifetime ago. Abruptly he's looking down at that face on the bank of the Potomac, bruised and battered by his own metal fist; then the image fades into Zola's bright round glasses, and into Pierce's smirk.

A few feet away something stirs, heaped in broken glass and still glittering with insignia, and Bucky's hand moves too fast even to see: one moment he's bending over Steve and the next he has the base commander by the throat, drawing him close, face to face. There's blank terror in the man's eyes. Bucky has something else he'd like to see there instead. When he speaks, in Russian, his voice has stones grinding in it.

" _Do you know what I am?_ "

One heartbeat, two, and there it is, the dawning horror of recognition. He can't speak, Bucky's hand is cutting off his air, but his mouth moves in the shape of the words. " _Zimnij Soldat_."

He watches a few seconds longer while that sinks in, and then squeezes his fist. There's a muffled snapping sound as the neck breaks, and he drops the limp body, wiping his hand roughly on the floor. Beside him Steve is very, very still, and he thinks for a sickening moment that it's too late, that the last of his life has run out while Bucky was wasting time on the Hydra commander--but then his chest rises in a shallow breath.

"Hang on," he says again, and now there is no stone in his voice at all. "You just hang on, Stevie. Gonna get you out of here." 

The blackened shield lies a few feet away, where it had fallen from Steve's arm, and Bucky glares at it as he picks it up and slips his left arm through the straps-- _why weren't you there, why weren't you on his back to protect him, how dare you sit there untouched?_ He has carried it before, a long time ago, the last time he had really been Bucky Barnes, and it feels exactly the same now as it did then: light, strong, steady, meant for someone he could never be. 

He gets his arms, shield and all, around Steve, lifts him as carefully as he can. Steve gives a horrible little bubbling gasp. His eyelashes part. The eyes beneath are huge black holes, dilated like a dead man's, just a thin ring of blue remaining: he does not see Bucky, looking through him to something beyond this room. Looking through him, and through time.

"Caught...you," Steve Rogers whispers. 

Bucky is carrying him as fast as he dares, even as a part of his mind is dizzy and terrified, falling away from a train seventy years gone and past. "Don't...don't try to talk," he says. "You're gonna be fine, they'll fix you, I'll _make_ them fix you, just hold on, okay?"

"Caught you," the small, still voice whispers again. "Didn't let you go. Didn't...let you fall...this time."

Oh, _God_. Bucky can't wipe away the tears that double, triple his vision: his hands are full. He is finally aware that while the tiny comlink tucked into _his_ ear is broken, silent, Steve's is twittering with tiny voices, and he knows at least the others are alive. 

He holds Steve closer to his chest, and begins to run. 

~

Later, Bucky will only be able to remember bits of the next few hours. The shocked faces of the others, vast green hands reaching out to him to take Steve despite his pleas; climbing unending stairs out of the underground hangar into a starless night so cold it took the breath away; stumbling through snow-covered scrubland for what felt like hours before the whine of the Quinjet descending could be heard over the wind; the bright lights and hard edges of the plane and Banner--no longer vast and green--snapping orders. Plastic boxes being opened, plastic tubing glistening, the appalling scarlet of blood, blood everywhere as they cut Steve's suit away. Gravity squashing him against the wall as the plane banked, sharply, and the whole fuselage juddering violently with the shock-front of a detonation, and then things going black and dizzy as his head struck the wall. 

The next thing he is really clearly aware of is being sick. It makes his headache worse. Somebody is steadying him and he thinks, _Steve_ , and then the pieces of memory all come back at once, like a flurry of punches. He groans. 

"Easy," whoever it is says. He doesn't recognize the voice. "Easy, man. You're okay. Deep breaths."

Bucky tries, wiping at his mouth. Things start to come back into focus. He's sitting bent over one of those kidney-shaped puke bowls, staring between his booted feet at a floor made up of the kind of square linoleum tiles you get in hospitals, prisons, and high schools. The bright ugly quality of the light reinforces the institutional impression. He sits up, and the steadying hand on his shoulder goes away. 

"Where are we?" he croaks. He's stiff and sore all over. There are vague memories of walking, or leaning heavily on somebody and stumbling, and a lot of people talking at once. 

"DC," says the man, and finally Bucky manages to push the hair out of his face and get a good look at him. It takes a minute, but he remembers the last time they met. 

"Did I..." Christ, his head hurts. "Did I kick you off a Helicarrier?"

The man chuckles. "Yeah, _and_ you broke my damn jetpack wings, plus you yanked the steering wheel out of a car while I was driving it. I did kick you real hard in the head at one point, though."

"Oh," says Bucky. "What, uh. What's your name?"

"Sam Wilson. I'm betting you don't remember me giving you a ride to Steve's place when he first found you doing your hobo act." Wilson offers him a hand. After a moment, he reaches out and shakes it. 

"Bucky Barnes," he says. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. He's gonna be okay," Wilson adds, before Bucky can ask. "Lost a lot of blood, cracked his shoulderblade and first rib, but he's gonna be fine."

"He jumped out of a plane without a parachute," Bucky says. "More than once."

"Yeah, well, dude's kind of given to dramatic gestures. And really terrible at asking for help when he's having a hard time dealing with shit. It's...not uncommon."

A penny drops. "That day, when...right before I got my new arm, when he was on the phone, he was talking to you, right?"

"Yup. It's my job, listening to people. Well, officially counseling veterans, but it's listening."

Bucky nods, rubbing at the lump on the back of his head where it and the Quinjet's bulkhead had made contact. "He needs that. Steve, I mean."

"He's not the only one," Wilson says. "Here."

Bucky takes the card he holds out, which has his phone numbers and email address. "It's up to you. If you want to talk, give me a call."

He nods slowly, and is surprised to find he means it. 

~

They don't let him in to see Steve. They're not letting people see Steve at all, other than Hill, who's there looking even more enigmatic than usual; he realizes they don't particularly want anybody to know he's in the hospital, lest there be a sudden invasion of reporters and TV cameras. And they definitely don't want people to know _Bucky_ is there, because James Barnes is dead and the Winter Soldier is still at the top of the Mysterious Public Enemy list; neither of him can be allowed to appear in public. A doctor comes to shine painfully bright lights in his eyes and ask him how many fingers she is holding up, and pronounces him to be in working order. Hours pass. 

He manages to sleep a little, slumped in one of the plastic waiting-room chairs, and dreams that he is inside a small cell made entirely out of hospital-floor linoleum tiles, buzzing with fluorescent light, the smell of disinfectant heavy in the air. In the dream he is sure he was too slow, too late, that Steve is gone because of him, and it's a very good thing Natasha Romanoff is the one who wakes him, because she's just fast enough to dart back out of range of his instinctive metal-handed grab. 

"Fuck," he says, blinking the dream away, trying to focus on her. "What....oh. Fuck. Sorry."

"It's okay." Natasha looks closely at him, and determines the immediate threat is over, sits down beside him. "How are you doing?"

Bucky drags his hands down his face, stubble rasping. "I'm fine," he says. 

"You look terrible. Have you had anything to eat?"

He swallows against renewed nausea. "Not hungry. What...I don't even know what day it is. How did we get here? What happened?"

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Getting to the Quinjet. Then..." He leans back against the wall, closing his eyes. "We took off, and when the base blew, we got thrown around pretty bad. I hit my head."

"You did. Made a beautiful _bong_ sound. To be honest it's just as well; Bruce was going to have to sedate you if you hadn't knocked yourself out, you were frantic." Her voice takes the sting out of the words. "I don't blame you. He looked...he looked bad."

The sequence of events is still blurry and confused, but he can clearly remember Steve's face, terribly white against the black jacket rolled up as a hasty pillow. Black cloth, white skin, a trickle of brilliant red from the corner of his mouth. The picture stands out so intensely in his memory that when he opens his eyes he can see its afterimage faintly superimposed on the hospital room. 

"Yeah," Bucky says, feeling very sick. "He did."

"Bruce got him stable for a while, but there weren't enough supplies on board to deal with that significant an injury, so we stopped in Warsaw to pick up what he needed. Conveniently enough I happen to have a number of contacts spread across Europe, some of whom are even still active." 

Bucky is looking down at his hands. She sits quite still, near enough that he's aware of the faint sweet smell of her hair. At some point over the past however many hours she's managed to grab a shower and some civilian clothes, and looks fresh as a goddamn daisy. He feels even worse.

"After that we flew straight here. At Mach 6 it didn't take that long, we arrived just after dawn. You were still pretty out of it. I heard one of the doctors say his body was already trying to heal on its own, trying to push out the bullet. He really is going to be okay, Bucky. He was conscious and talking, they had to tell him to quit moving around and let his bones get on with repairing themselves."

"They won't let me see him."

"Yeah, they're not letting anybody see him right now, but Hill is pulling strings to get him out of here as soon as possible, back to Stark's place. Tony and Clint are already there. Did anybody even get you any painkillers?"

"No," he says. "They're going to let him out? When?"

"Soon. A few hours, I think. Look, sit tight and I'll go get you some coffee and something for your head. Sam Wilson just called me and asked me to check on you, I thought they'd already gotten you safely out of here."

"Wilson was here. Earlier. When I woke up again."

"Yeah, he got here as soon as he could. I called him when we arrived." Her voice is warm; Bucky knows of only a few people who can elicit that response from her. "Stayed until he knew Steve was going to be okay, and then went to sit with you. He said you could probably use some answers when you stopped being mildly concussed."

"I'm mildly concussed?"

"You heal fast," she says. "Not as fast as Rogers, but fast."

"Oh," he says, because there doesn't seem to be anything useful to reply. He can feel his heartbeat hot and fast in the bruise on the back of his head. Natasha sighs. 

"It'll be okay," she tells him, again. "We'll get out of here and back to the tower, and he'll get better. You saved his life, Bucky."

"No. He saved mine. That...that shot was meant for me. He knew what he was doing."

Natasha is quiet, beside him. "You got him out of there," she says after a moment. "And we blew the base. A successful mission."

He shrugs. There's a sort of numbness in his mind, as if some much larger pain is being held at bay by heavy drugs, and he has felt that kind of numbness often enough to dread the pain that's waiting behind it. There is nothing to say.

After another moment Natasha gives his shoulder a light squeeze and gets up. "I'll go get you that aspirin."

Bucky nods, and leans back against the wall again, closing his eyes. 

~

She brings him food he can't eat, hospital coffee he tries and sets aside, aspirin he dry-swallows. He's glad when she leaves again, because she is not a restful person to be around, not the way Wilson had been; he can feel the taut nervous energy in her from several feet away, and he does not have it in him to maintain a conversation. He sits still, with his eyes closed, his hair covering his face, for some unknowable length of time.

~

There is a kind of anesthetic that comes with being managed by other people. The Winter Soldier had experienced it to a greater extent; but Bucky is aware of it now. The trip from the hospital to the airport, the transfer of Steve's gurney, the takeoff and climb, all feel as if they're happening to somebody else, somebody a long way away. He had been fully awake and aware, fully present, when he'd first seen Steve; just a glimpse of a pale face surrounded by tubes and wires and things that beeped, but concrete evidence that Steve Rogers is still alive. Then the dull numbness had descended again, and Bucky let himself be led and shepherded without making any effort to be present. 

He is quietly and carefully sick again somewhere over Baltimore, sitting in the back of the plane. Nobody notices him. Banner and Romanoff and a nurse are sitting by the hospital gurney secured between the Gulfstream's seats. Coming in to LaGuardia he begins to feel an uncomfortable pressure in his chest, something like a too-tight weapons harness around his ribs. It vaguely arouses his attention for a little while; then he gets used to it, the novelty gone. More being herded, this time from the jet into a waiting helicopter. It's nighttime, drizzling. A whole day has gone by without him seeing the sun. The darkness and his tangled hair prevent the others from getting a good look at his face.

Manhattan banks slowly beneath them, glittering canyons of lit windows in the night. He can't see Brooklyn from this side of the helicopter, though he tries. The tightness in his chest makes it uncomfortable to lean over very far. He thinks he has never been more tired in his life, in any of his lives, and with vague horror realizes he is remembering the cryo tank with something close to fondness. 

Up ahead the glowing _STARK_ sign comes into view. Bucky supposes he is glad: all the good things that have happened to him since the 1940s have happened there. He has no real understanding of _home_ as it pertains to himself, but he's aware that for other people it has weight and meaning. He wonders where Steve considers "home." The apartment in DC? He can't remember anything about it other than that it had felt safe. 

The helicopter turns round as it descends; that and the brief flare just before landing nearly make him sick again, might have done if he'd had anything left to bring up. He hangs on grimly until they're on the pad, and through the weird insulating haze is a little surprised that it is difficult to make himself get up and climb out. 

Banner and the nurse are easing Steve's gurney out of the helicopter; she is holding an IV bag up as the two of them roll him inside. Bucky watches, glad that the journey is finally over, that they are done having to move for a little while. His hair whips around his face in the slowing rotor wash. He had pulled it back, hadn't he? No, but that was before Steve was hurt, sitting in the Quinjet and looking up to realize Steve was staring at him. 

It's cold up here. Bucky turns his face up to the black sky, aware of icy raindrops touching his skin. This, like the rest of the world, seems to be happening to somebody else. 

Romanoff is saying his name, calling to him. He lets go of the doorway of the chopper and blinks through a sparkly multicolored haze that for some reason replaces his vision for a moment; when it dissipates he sees her at the glass doors, gesturing: _what are you waiting for, come on inside!_ With an effort Bucky crosses the small distance, and when he approaches the door, he can see expressions flicker across her face in rapid succession: irritation, surprise, and then what looks like horror. He's confused. He's confused and his chest is so tight, maybe he should say something about that to someone, he isn't sure; the door swings open, and he stumbles over the threshold and loses what's left of his balance, falling heavily against Natasha. She staggers under his weight. He can see her mouth opening and closing, as if she's shouting something, but all he can hear is the roaring of his own blood in his ears; and then that sparkly blindness is back, stronger, eclipsing his vision completely, before it turns black. 

~

The next thing Bucky is aware of is the sound of people talking. It takes a moment before he can make out words:

"...hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours, and with a metabolism like his that's a significant issue, plus the head injury, plus dehydration, plus just astonishing levels of stress and anxiety."

_Wonder what_ that _poor sap's deal is,_ he thinks.

"I can't believe I didn't notice anything was wrong," says another voice. "He was quiet, but then he _is_ quiet, compared to the rest of you."

"The rest of us were kind of focused on O Captain My Captain," a third voice puts in drily. "Don't beat yourself up about it, Agent Romanoff. He's fine. He's listening to us right now."

Bucky cracks open an eyelid, squeezes it shut again immediately at the brightness, and then has another try. He's lying on one arm of the long sectional couch with his feet up on cushions, he's covered with a woolly afghan that is tasteless in the extreme, and--ugh-- _he's_ got an IV bag too. Banner, Romanoff, and Stark are sitting on the other arm of the couch, watching him. 

"What happened?" The haze is gone, the depersonalization: he's here, present, accounted for, and feels like a wrung-out dishrag. With a headache. 

"You swooned," Stark says. "I didn't see it live, but I caught the playback. Frankly, not much better than a 6.5 for form and style, Barnes. I have seen more graceful swoons. Partly Romanoff's fault, though."

"Get bent, Stark," she says, with something like fondness in her voice. "Bucky, I'm sorry. I should have realized you were not remotely close to fine." She collects empty coffee cups, passing by him on her way out of the room and very briefly touching the hillock his feet make in the appalling afghan.

Banner gets up too, comes over to him, takes his pulse. "Rogers is okay, before you ask. He's comfortably installed in the infirmary, pumped full of nice antibiotics and pain medication, and mostly asleep--which is the best thing for him at the moment. And yes, you can see him, in a little while."

Bucky looks up at him. "You swear?"

"I solemnly swear. Meanwhile, you need to stay horizontal for a little while longer while we fill you up with fluids and make you eat something. I could wish the damn hospital had handled the whole situation better, leaving you on your own all day in that nasty little waiting room was unconscionable. I would have done something about it if I'd known."

"He gets the same results as shouty doctors get without the shouting," Stark says. "It's impressive. Whole herds of self-important people in scrubs scuttling around to do his bidding."

Banner goes pink. "Be quiet, Tony. Or at least make an effort, I don't ask you to achieve the impossible. --How are you feeling, other than exhausted?" 

Bucky considers. "Lousy," he says after a moment. "But better than I was."

"You were having something rather like a prolonged low-grade anxiety attack, as far as I can tell. Your physical condition wasn't helping matters, but we're working on that. Are you still nauseated, or could you try eating something?"

He realizes belatedly that he is not actually hungry, he is _starving_. "No. I mean, yeah. I'd...really like food. What time is it?"

"Close to midnight, you've been out for about four hours." Stark claps his hands. "JARVIS, do we have invalid gruel in the pantry?"

"No, sir," replies the voice smoothly. "I am afraid gruel of all specifications is unavailable, following your edict with regard to Ms. Potts' attempts to get you to consume steel-cut oats for breakfast. May I recommend soup and toast to begin with?"

Bucky finds the weird feeling tugging at one corner of his mouth is attempting to become a smile. Steve is safe, Steve is recovering, they are back home in the tower where he knows where everything is and doesn't have to worry about strangers; the tight anxiety compressing his chest has relaxed and released him. He takes an experimental deep breath, not actually aware that the tower has changed from "the tower" to "home" in his head. Yeah, okay. He can breathe, for now. 

"Could you make that a grilled cheese?"


	14. Chapter 14

_And some things are inflexible_  
 _They break but they don't bend_  
 _Like the things that are_  
 _And the things that might have been_  
\--Tony Carey, _The Things That Might Have Been_

Steve hurts. 

He doesn't feel like opening his eyes; he knows the ceiling is a depressingly dingy shade of beige with a brown water-stain in one corner that used to look like Olive Oyl in profile and has over the past months grown to look more like Bluto. He knows every inch of that ceiling, because he has spent a great deal of time lying in bed and staring up at it. The insides of his eyelids are a preferable alternative. 

He's not sure what's wrong with him, only that his chest and left shoulder ache with each breath, and that makes him think glumly _Probably coming down with something again, that's just great, that's what, three times in the past couple months?_ If he's careful about it Bucky won't know he doesn't feel good, because Bucky's been worried enough about him just recently and...

...it slowly occurs to him that the bed he's lying in is very much more comfortable than the one which went with the water-stained ceiling. He's dizzy for a moment while his mind changes temporal gear; when the vertigo passes, he opens his eyes far enough to determine that he's in the Stark Tower infirmary, not a Hydra base outside of Chelyabinsk. 

Steve turns his head on the pillows, letting his gaze slide down from the ceiling. Glass walls, white, chrome, pale wood furniture. Beds. Bucky. 

Bucky: pale, shadows smudged under the eyes, could use a shave and a T-shirt that fits, but undeniably _alive_. 

He must have moved, or made some small sound, because Bucky draws in a sharp breath and stares at him, reaching for Steve's hand. 

"You're awake," he says. 

This is also undeniable. Steve curls his fingers round Bucky's, the metal smooth and only slightly cool to the touch. When he tries to talk, his voice is rusty. "You're alive."

"Yeah," and there's unbalanced laughter under the word. "So're you. Steve, you scared six kinds of hell out of me. Don't...don't do that."

"What...happened?" He can remember leaping, remember seeing the little red eye of the laser sight gleaming in Bucky's hair; after that things went confused and painful before stopping entirely. 

"You didn't have your goddamn shield on your back is what happened," Bucky says, and he can still hear that slightly off-balance quality in his voice, as if faintly hysterical laughter is not very far away. "So instead of bouncing off the shield the way it was _supposed_ to, the guy's bullet went into your back. I can't...I don't..." He breaks off, swallowing hard. "I got you out of there and Banner and the rest kept you alive, flew us back to DC. You were in the hospital."

"What day is it?" Steve asks. He has no idea how long it's been.

"Wednesday. Two days. You, uh. You really do heal fast."

He peers down at the white bandages round his left shoulder. Vague memories are beginning to surface: doctors in masks, telling him to stay still, the swirling red-edged blackness of anesthesia; being lifted, carried, the bed tilting under him. Banner's face swimming out of the fog, his voice firm and reassuring, telling him to rest, that he was safe. Now he can remember asking the question: _where's Bucky?_

_Captain Rogers, please, you really have to hold still._

_Where is he? Is he okay?_

_Who's Bucky?_ Voices in the background, a query, something in answer. _Oh, right, him. Yes. Now count backwards from one hundred, please._

"They wouldn't let me see you," Steve says, poking at the bandages, rewarded with a completely predictable jab of pain. "I asked where you were."

"They wouldn't let _me_ see _you_. Wilson...Sam Wilson...came to tell me you were going to be all right, but nobody let me see you till they were transferring you back here."

Bucky sounds really unhappy about that. Steve looks up at him, still somewhat logy and dazed, and can see in his face the Bucky he used to know and that strange new person who spars with Natasha as if they're on the Bolshoi stage and who makes sashimi out of Hydra personnel. He doesn't know this person. He doesn't, but that doesn't matter, because this person is _here_ to be not-known; he had done what had to be done, what he had to do, and had not failed. Hadn't failed him. 

_Grab my hand,_ he thinks. He has lived a very great many lifetimes remembering that moment, remembering the sickening sudden change in the world. Somewhere in the back of his mind a little voice has always murmured _you could have reached farther, you could have done something, you could have stopped it all but you didn't_ , and in the weeks and months since DC that little voice has quietly but undeniably grown more insistent. Now it's silenced: he _did_ do something, his greatest failure isn't absolved but in some part balanced out by this small stupid thing he has done, this jumping into the path of a bullet. 

"Steve?" Bucky is saying. He blinks, and the train goes away, the train and the Hydra base both go away and he is back in the white comfort of the tower. 

"Mmm?" Jumping, he thinks. Jumping without a chute. 

"There's...a lot of stuff we have to talk about," and it sounds as if it's difficult even for Bucky to say the words. "Stuff about what happened. What to do next."

Steve smiles up at new-Bucky, and doesn't realize it's exactly the same smile he once wore when he was running a temperature and trying to convince _his_ Bucky he felt just fine. "Okay," he says. 

Bucky looks angry and awful and frightened all at once, and that's not right, Steve thinks, he squeezes the metal fingers tight in his. "You're right," he says. "We do have to talk. About things." Lots of things, but not including whether new-Bucky remembers what he'd said before going under for the arm surgery, or if it's dumb even to talk about stuff like, oh, I love you, I will love you until there is nothing more of me to do anything at all other than scatter like ash on the wind, I will never stop loving you but I don't know if you mind, or for that matter if I can actually put on the suit again and carry the shield and be captain of absolutely anything. "What they're going to say," he explains. "They can't keep you a secret forever."

"What?" That angry-miserable look dilutes with puzzlement. "Steve, what do you mean?"

"Well, if I exist...and the rest of the Avengers do...so do you. Only not the Winter Soldier. Don't...know who you have to be, now. But they can't pretend you don't exist."

He is so tired suddenly that it feels as if sleep is physically lapping at him like dark water, little wavelets coaxing him under the surface. "It's okay," he insists, with what is left of his consciousness. "Everything's going to be okay."

Bucky says something he can't hear, as his eyes droop closed; but Bucky is there to say anything at all, and for now that's worth everything; that is worth all this confusion, that is everything, that is good enough. 

 

~

Three o'clock in the morning, and Pepper cannot tell why she is awake, what has woken her; there aren't any alarms, the tower is quiet and still, but something somewhere is not right. She lies looking up into the darkness, hoping for a little while that she might be able to get back to sleep without going to investigate, and ten minutes later accepts that this is not to be.

Tony is sleeping sprawled out in his normal REM configuration, taking up as much mattress real estate as possible. She carefully substitutes a pillow for the part of her his arm has been draped over, and pads out of the room--and then, a moment later, comes back to pull his terrible paisley dressing-gown off the back of the door, because La Perla sleepwear is great for certain applications but not so much for confronting midnight prowlers.

In the richly figured silk, with her hair coming out of its nighttime ponytail, she looks no more than twenty-five and breathtakingly innocent--until you notice the tiny black Stark Industries cylinder in one hand: the littlest of stun guns which accompanies her everywhere. Whoever's moving is in the kitchen, and Pepper realizes just before she slips in the door that JARVIS is undoubtedly aware of the situation, and has chosen--with JARVIS' characteristic subtlety--not to raise any alarms. 

Or to dissuade her from her approach. 

Pepper is still trying to mentally juggle that lot as she recognizes the man leaning against the tempered glass of the far wall.

The overhead lights are off, but there's more than enough illumination from the city itself for her to see by. He's resting his forehead against the glass, his metal fingers pressed against it, looking out over a town he probably doesn't even recognize except for those landmarks that have been part of world culture since the thirties. He's wearing borrowed sweatpants and a t-shirt that's too tight for him, unflatteringly tight: one of Tony's, not Steve's. His hair is down and doing its office as a curtain. 

The lines of his back, the drooping shoulders, are so tired and so unhappy that Pepper doesn't even think about it before she comes forward into the room from the stairway. She moves quietly, but not so quietly that it takes him completely by surprise when she speaks: she tries not to startle ex-assassin/superspies, as a general policy.

"Hey," she says, softly. Bucky turns from the window, and the absurdly guilty expression on his face makes something in her chest ache. "Can't sleep?"

"No. Yeah. I mean...no, I guess I can't."

She leans on the end of the breakfast bar, registering the bruise-colored shadows under his eyes, the tight uncomfortable breathing. His right hand is taped up as if he's been working the punching bag the way Steve sometimes does, and Pepper wonders if they need to go get the shopvac to clean up all the sand off the gym floor again. "Let me guess," she says, gently. "You want to shake him until his teeth rattle and tell him to stop being a twit."

Bucky's hand curls into a fist, resting against the glass: she notices the wince, though he hides it quickly. Definitely a case for the shopvac. "I just...he's...I don't know what to _do_." It's a lot more emotion than she's ever seen from him, and obviously he's aware of that too: he looks away, flushed and uncomfortable. "Sorry."

"For what, having feelings?" Pepper comes closer, now, reaches out to touch his shoulder; he doesn't jerk away, but she can feel the tension thrumming under her fingers. "This kind of thing is tough for everybody. There's really no good way to say to someone 'I'm extremely fond of you but your self-destructive behavior is driving me up the wall, would you please quit being an idiot' and have it sink in."

Bucky looks up from the floor. This close, without his hair in the way, without the scowl, she is struck for the first time by how physically attractive he really is: the fine sharp modelling of his cheekbones and nose, the clear blue-grey eyes with their thick lashes, the full curves of his mouth--now tightened unhappily, but Pepper can imagine how effective his uninhibited smile would be. 

He blinks at her. "How did you know?"

"That that's what's bothering you?" She smiles a little, leaving her hand where it is. "I've spent my fair share of time dealing with it myself. --I'm going to make hot chocolate, would you like some?"

Another blink, and she thinks, _God, has nobody ever actually shown even the most basic_ kindness _to him before?_ and then realizes, no, not since 1944, they almost certainly have not. The ache in her chest contracts tightly. After a moment, he wraps his arms around himself and nods. 

Pepper applies gentle pressure, and he lets her guide him away from the window to sit at one of the chairs along the breakfast bar. He's still looking confused, which is still more than a little heartbreaking, and she gives him time to gather his wits properly by busying herself with saucepans and milk. "--Do you want the kind with the little crunchy marshmallows in it or the kind with the big chewy ones?"

"Crunchy," he says, still sounding a little surprised. 

"Crunchy is the best," she agrees. "How much do you know about Tony Stark?"

"Huh?"

"How he turned himself into Iron Man, the arc reactor, the whole bit?"

"A little. Steve said he had surgery to fix him, right? That he doesn't have the reactor anymore?" 

"That's right. He had it for a long time, though. It originally ran on palladium." Pepper stirs hot chocolate mix into the mugs. "Which is toxic. Gradually it started to poison him. Nobody knew about it, he was very good at hiding things--still is--but there wasn't anything he could do about it: he needed the reactor to stay alive, and the reactor needed palladium, which was killing him slowly."

Bucky's eyes are huge. She shakes up the whipped-cream can and deposits a rosette atop each mug, pushing one across the counter to him. "Tony's not good with impulse control, plus he has several billion dollars at his disposal to be impulsive with. When he thought he was dying, he...well, started doing stupid things. More stupid, I mean."

He doesn't take his eyes off her, but his hands wrap around the cup and he takes a long sip, and it takes every ounce of self-control in Pepper Potts' possession not to call attention to the fact that he has a dab of whipped cream on the tip of his nose. 

"At the time I didn't know anything about the palladium, just that he was behaving like a complete idiot and possibly trying to get himself killed, and, well, it felt pretty comprehensively terrible that he apparently cared so little about me and my feelings that he'd ignore what his behavior was doing to me. And to everyone else who cared for him."

"What happened?"

"Oh, well, a lot of things were happening at once. Tony appointed me CEO, which was just as well, since he was doing his best to ruin Stark Industries and _somebody_ needed to keep the company from falling apart. We...had more or less broken up at that point. In the end, he found his father's notes and plans for the creation of a new element, which Howard hadn't had the technology to synthesize, but which Tony did; he successfully produced enough of the new element to replace the palladium core in his reactor. Just in time to deal with the denouement of a gigantic mess caused by an idiot named Justin Hammer working with a Russian engineer to create military drone robots. Everything turned out all right, except for a lot of property damage, and Tony did a lot of apologizing to me. The point is that I know it feels absolutely miserable to have somebody you love behaving as if their life doesn't matter."

Bucky looks down at his left arm. "New elements," he says, tapping the fingertips on the countertop, examining the slightly roughened tactile sensory surfaces. "Did he tell you what this one is named?"

"That metal's new? I didn't know," she says, a little surprised. "Although I _did_ know he was absolutely thrilled at the chance to invent a new arm for you."

"Piperium," Bucky says, and takes a swig of hot chocolate. "--Um. Don't tell him I told you, if it's supposed to be a surprise."

Pepper blinks at him, and then at the neat metal curves and planes of his arm. "Really?"

"Pretty sure he went with that instead of 'starkium.' I dunno, I was kind of out of it at the time. Point is, you mean everything to him," Bucky says, matter-of-factly. "You know that. You must have known that, right? The whole time?"

"I...wasn't sure." Pepper's own hands are tight round her mug. "I wanted to think so, but I couldn't be sure, while he was acting like that. Afterward it was different, but during that time I couldn't be sure."

"That's the worst part."

She looks at him across the counter. His hair is doing its best curtain imitation. "That's the worst part," he says again. "Wanting to think so but not being sure."

Pepper stays still, quiet. After a moment his hand rises to push the hair back, and she can see his face again: he looks terribly young. 

"Tell me about him?" 

It's a very soft little question, and one she hadn't meant to ask. His face goes blank. He stays where he is, looking down, for long enough that she's afraid she's really messed up; but when he finally does look up at her, his expression is less unreadable. 

"Okay, but..." He slides his empty mug back across the counter. "Could I have some more?"

~

In the end she does tell him about the whipped cream on his nose. It takes three more cups, liberally spiked with brandy, before he's done: once he starts talking, the words seem to tumble out more and more easily. The cliched metaphor is a bursting dam, but she thinks it's more like a landslide, beginning with just a few pebbles bouncing and ending up with half a mountainside in motion. 

He tells her about the little blond kid with the toast-rack chest and floppy hair, the kid who had everything wrong with him at once but still never backed down from a fight. About how, in elementary school, he'd stepped in to bloody the nose of a kid twice Steve's size who was sitting on his chest and banging Steve's head against the ground, and when the kid had gone running off in tears how he'd helped Steve up and said something about bullies--and been gobsmacked when Steve admitted to starting the fight. "He was..." Bucky gestures helplessly. "Couldn't really breathe, doing that awful whistling wheeze thing, I thought he was gonna keel over right there but he just hung on to me for a couple minutes and got himself more or less together. First thing he says when he can talk is 'I had him on the ropes' and I just." He runs his hands through his hair. "What do you _do_ with someone like that?"

 _Love him_ , Pepper thinks but does not say; does not have to say. She just watches Bucky remembering. 

"It was like that from then on. He'd see someone kicking a puppy or being mean to some girl or whatever, and he'd just wade in and punch the asshole, no matter how badly he was outmatched. Lucky he didn't wear glasses, his ma would've had to buy stock in Scotch tape to keep sticking them back together. I couldn't always be there to get him out of it, but I tried." 

He'd tried, as they grew up. When Steve had been too sick to get up, too sick to leave the house, Bucky had come over and spent hours there, keeping him entertained while he was awake and sitting by the bed while he slept. Steve's mom had been grateful to him, which was uncomfortable and slightly weird to think about--he was just a kid, after all, and Mrs. Rogers was a grownup--but he didn't really mind. All that mattered was cheering Stevie up. He'd bring over homework and they'd do it together, Bucky absently steadying his friend when he shook with chills, supporting him with an arm round his shoulders when his cough bent him double. They'd been inseparable; after Steve's mother died he moved in with Bucky, and somewhere along the line Bucky had realized that he wasn't just fond, wasn't just amused and moved and protective, but was actually no-fooling head-over-heels _stupid_ for his best friend. 

Then the war, and with it the draft, had come. Steve had immediately wanted to volunteer. "I mean, on the one hand it was good to know that they'd take one look at him and laugh real hard and tear up his forms, but...he was so _determined_ , he wanted it so much, I couldn't really talk about it because I knew I'd be drafted and I'd have given anything _not_ to be. I was never brave, not like Steve. Sure, I saw there was awful shit going on, but I never had that need to...to punch the world in the face when it wasn't being as good as it ought to be. I was scared, flat-out scared because I didn't want to go get shot by Germans." Bucky laughs a very little. "Or by anybody else, but Germans seemed to be the most likely. I couldn't ever tell him I was flat-out terrified to go do what he wanted more than anything else to be doing. He...tried, what, four times, five, to get in? Pretending he was from all over the goddamn place. I was sure he'd get caught and get in trouble, I tried to convince him to give it up. The night before I shipped out was the last time I saw him until that factory in Austria."

Pepper nods, not wanting to interrupt. He looks different, more animated; he doesn't talk with his hands like Tony does, but there's gesture and movement, not that eerie unreadable stillness of the first few days of his recovery. "All the time I was over there I just...the only thing that kept me going was the thought that he wasn't doing what I was, that he was home safe in Brooklyn and nobody was gonna drop any bombs on him or put a bullet through his head, that he didn't have to sleep in damp freezing tents or eat that awful slop. He sent me stuff. Letters, drawings. He was always good at drawing, but he taught himself to be _real_ good at it, like he could've been an illustrator or something. I got him a set of colored pencils one year for Christmas and you should've seen his face just light up, it was..." He sighs, swirling the tiny marshmallows in his cup. "I loved watching him draw."

She can picture it, just about. She's seen Steve drawing before, all of them have, but he never really leaves his work out where anybody can see it. There's something deeply touching in his intentness, bent over the paper, sometimes the very tip of his tongue visible at the corner of his mouth. Her chest aches sharply again. Beyond him, the black sky is lightening to ultramarine: they've been talking all night.

"Anyway," he says. "We were captured and...Zola happened. I don't remember a lot of it, which is okay with me. I don't know how long I was in there, but I was pretty messed up when Steve found me, about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I remembered him. That was...hard to get my head around. He was still _Steve_ , though, still the kid I'd known, just suddenly able to do all the things he'd always wanted to be able to do. Even after all the shit he'd been through and seen, he was still...I dunno, basically optimistic? Not really innocent, exactly, or completely idealistic, but still generally convinced that the world was a good place and people he trusted were worth trusting."

His voice has begun to roughen. Pepper thinks he probably hasn't talked this much all at once for....a very long time; even as the thought occurs to her, he clears his throat with a wince. "That's...that's not really there right now. That general optimism. I know what happened during DC, at least the parts of it I was activated for. I know what I did to him. He still saved me. Found me, got me here. Listened to all the things I've done. But he's...different, now."

"He loves you," Pepper says. 

"Maybe he did, but I don't know about now. He looks at me as if he doesn't even know me."

"Do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Know yourself? You've been through hell, Bucky. You aren't exactly the same person you were when all this started, and neither is he."

"He took a bullet for me," Bucky says. "And he just looks sort of vague about it. God, I thought he was _dead_ , he said something about...about catching me this time, not letting me fall."

Pepper thinks of Tony, hands outstretched: _I'll catch you_. Thinks of the look she saw on his face for just that second as she was falling past his reach. It is still the worst expression she has ever seen, on anybody; cold horror and negation and burning, terrible, acid guilt. She can very easily picture that expression on Steve Rogers' face. 

Across the countertop Bucky looks miserable, and she can't stop herself reaching to take his hands--one warm and hard-callused, human, and one cool metal--and squeezing them. "Give him time to get back on his feet, but I'm pretty sure he's still crazy about you. He just...the betrayal of his trust with S.H.I.E.L.D. turning out to be completely rotten with Hydra, that hit him hard." Him and Natasha both.

"And I was Hydra," he says, and coughs, clears his throat with a wince. "What time is it?"

Pepper looks over at the microwave. "Five-thirty."

"Oh, shit. I kept you up talking all night." He really is starting to lose his voice. "Sorry. I didn't...didn't mean to unload on you like that. I'm sorry."

She accepts the tacit request to close the subject. "Shh, don't worry about that--did it help at all? Getting it off your chest?"

Bucky blinks a few times, looking sort of surprised, and yawns. "...Yeah. Yeah, I guess it did. Thank you."

The kitchen has been growing steadily lighter, the sky in the east turning from ultramarine through rich cobalt, through a thin band of jade-green, into yellow at the horizon. Pepper smiles a bit. "Good. It's still going to be hours before anyone else is awake, why don't you try to get a couple hours of sleep?"

Another yawn, bigger than the first one, threatens to take the top of his head off, and he looks sheepish. "That...sounds really good right about now. Thanks. Thank you."

"My pleasure," Pepper says, and puts their mugs in the dishwasher. "Just don't assume the worst? I know it's the easiest thing to do, but..."

He just nods. Outside, in the gathering dawn, a couple of sparrows alight on the windowframe. When he's gone, she thinks she can hear them singing, even through the glass.


	15. Chapter 15

_If you're watching it, you're part of it_  
 _If you're close enough to see it, you're in it_  
 _There's no line drawn, dividing the two_  
 _And if you don't know where you come from_  
 _You don't know where you're going...do you?_  
\---Tony Carey, _Where We Want You_

When Tony gets to the kitchen nobody's there, but the debris of breakfast indicates that people have been and gone. He'd woken to find himself alone, which isn't all that unusual. 

"Status report," he says to the empty room, blearily sorting through the K-cups. "Where is everybody? Also who drank all the goddamn sumatra mandheling, I need to yell at them." 

"Agents Romanoff and Barton have left the building, Doctor Banner is in his quarters, Captain Rogers remains in the infirmary, and Sergeant Barnes is asleep, sir. And Ms. Potts is in your laboratory."

"What's she doing?" Tony goes for a less-prestigious selection and jams it into the Keurig. It's not unheard-of for Pepper to visit the lab, but it generally happens because he, Tony, is also in there. 

"Reading Sergeant Barnes' file, sir," JARVIS says. 

"She what?" There, finally, coffee. He breathes in the steam and tries to imagine what the hell Pepper wants with Bedhead October's backstory. 

"She is reading his file. In fact she has now read it three times, and has requested the translation of several passages from the Russian."

"Sounds like my idea of a real fun Sunday morning," Tony says, with an eyebrow raised. "Specially the really fucking graphic parts about the arm. I better go see what's up. He's safely out of the way?"

"As I mentioned, he is asleep, sir. In the room he and Captain Rogers have been sharing."

"Not in the infirmary? Huh." Tony shrugs and gets another mug out of the cupboard. If he brings Pepper coffee, that's a thoughtful and sensitive gesture rather than an excuse to ask what she's looking for in Barnes' file, right? Right. He is _absolutely_ a thoughtful and sensitive gentleman. 

She's sitting at one of the workbenches in his silk dressing-gown, which is a little rumpled, and her hair's come out of its ponytail and is hanging in a red-gold curtain around her face. For a moment Tony can't think why _that's_ so familiar, and then he says a bad word under his breath. The file is open in her hands. 

"Knock knock," he says, and the glass door opens itself for him, because he has his hands full. "You're supposed to say--oh, shit, Pep, what's the matter?"

She jumps; and when she turns to look at him, shaking back the curtain of hair, her face is blotched with tears. Tony hurries over, plonks the coffee cups down. "What is it? What's wrong?" And why hadn't JARVIS said anything about how upset she was?

Pepper gives an unlovely snuffle. The condition of her face suggests that she's been crying for some time. "Nothing," she says, only it comes out _dothig_.

"Bullshit," Tony says, taking the box of tissues DUM-E has obviously been awkwardly offering for some time. "You got up in the middle of the night and stole my bathrobe to come down here and read all about horrendous Hydra shit, that's not nothing. --JARVIS, why the hell didn't you tell me she was crying?"

"Ms. Potts requested me not to, sir."

"Pep..." He takes the file out of her hands, sets it down on the workbench, still open. "Pep, come here?" He hasn't seen her like this since Extremis. Just as the name crosses his mind, he thinks he can see a faint flicker of orange light ripple under her skin, for an instant, so quickly Tony doesn't even know if it was really there. He's holding out his arms. It takes a long, heartbreaking moment before she leans in and lets him hug her tight. 

Tony rocks her a little, kissing the top of her head, and she clings to him, hoarse sobs ratcheting out of her chest. He can clearly remember doing this after her nightmares, after she woke screaming that she was on fire, that the bed was burning; he strokes firm circles on her back the way he'd done before, and as before it seems to give her some stability. In a few minutes the sobbing dies away, and she just leans against his chest, limp, breath shuddering. 

"C'mon," he says, getting an arm under her knees and lifting her, "tell me what this is about? Why'd you want to come look up all the things they did to him?" He carries her over to the beat-up couch on which she has napped many a time while he was working. She doesn't protest as he deposits her gently on the couch and sits beside her. 

"Barnes," she says. "Bucky. I...I woke up in the middle of the night and found him in the kitchen." 

"Underbed Red does fridge-raid missions now?"

"Tony," and it's a tiny little voice, thick with tears, but there's her normal asperity underneath. Tony relaxes a bit. "You want me to tell you this or not?"

He zips his lips, and gets a tiny shudder of laughter out of her, and that relaxes him more. "He couldn't sleep. I made us hot chocolate and got him to tell me what was wrong. Steve's...acting weird, Tony. Not like himself. Or like how Bucky remembers him."

"Weird how? I kind of thought the self-sacrifice thing was his deal. I mean, famed for it and all."

"Weird as if he doesn't really care all that much what happens to him. I've seen it too, he's just kind of vague and unhappy a lot of the time." 

Tony can remember him before New York, up in his face. _Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away and what are you?_

 _Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist?_ he'd offered. 

_I know guys with none of that worth ten of you. Yeah, I've seen the footage. The only thing you really fight for is yourself. You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you._

_Are you for real?_ Tony had wondered. Out loud he'd said _I think I would just cut the wire._

_Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero._

He remembers the sincere and urgent need to punch Steve in that perfect square jaw of his, remembers it vividly. Pepper is waving her hand in front of his face: he blinks, comes out of the memory. "Sorry," he says. "Yeah. The self-sacrifice bit used to be _for_ something, didn't it?" For a greater good, for a force worth believing in.

"After DC, who can he trust? He's got to be having some problems with who he'd actually be fighting for, when he fights." Pepper looks a little better now, still red-eyed and sniffly but less actively miserable. 

"Okay, so Rogers has issues. We all do. He seemed to be okay in Mayak, or at least he was able to do the job at hand. If that sniper hadn't been there, if he didn't have to take that shot to protect Barnes, we'd all have come on back and argued about shawarma and figured out if we can work like this, Barnes included, if we can be a functional team for as long as it takes Thor to do his thing out in Space Viking World or whatever. Didn't go down like that. Okay, so we move on."

"Bucky's trying," she says. "He's...trying really hard. He told me about Steve when they were growing up, what kind of person Steve was. He talked until he was losing his voice, I don't think he's ever had a chance to just _tell_ anybody those things and have them listen." She thunks her head against his shoulder. "I learned more about him--about Bucky as a person--than I thought any of us would get to know. When he went to bed I came down here to read his file because I knew the story but I needed to know exactly _what_ they did to him, what he went through, how they made him into a weapon, because..."

"Because you got made into one, too," Tony says, softly. She nods against him. "Oh, _Pep_." 

He can see again the fiery elemental glow mottling her skin, lighting the copper of her hair, smoldering inside her eyes: a woman made of fire, walking out of a wall of flames. He remembers--because he always remembers, when he thinks about any of that time--the moment when he had reached out to catch her, and failed, and had to watch her fall. 

_Rogers had to watch_ him _fall, too, didn't he,_ Tony thinks. _Only Barnes_ didn't _come back. Not for a lifetime, and then not as himself._ He can see Rogers deliberately shove the _Valkyrie_ 's yoke all the way forward, its nose pointing at the ice, and thinks he can understand a little more of what was going through his head.

"I knew it would be terrible," she says, waving a hand at the file. "I knew it would be, like, who would _do_ this to another human being? But knowing something is going to be bad and...and actually reading it...I wasn't prepared. I don't think anybody really could be." Her tears hadn't been even remotely under her control. "I thought about him telling me about buying Steve colored pencils for Christmas, about...about the little things...and I read through the whole file and I just..."

"Oh, Pep," he says again, very softly. He cups his hand to the back of her head. "But you read it anyway."

"I had to." She presses her face into his shoulder. "I...we...owe him that much. Not just what he did, but what...what was done to him. I don't think I got all of it, JARVIS translated some parts for me, but I read enough to understand. I was luckier. They didn't...control me completely. I knew who I was. It's not comparable."

Tony strokes her hair in silence for a little while, very much aware that he does not deserve Pepper Potts, but that he will continue to endeavor real hard to do so. 

"Barnes doesn't know about Extremis?" he says, quietly.

"No. Or at least not from me."

"Would you be okay with him knowing?"

Pepper shrugs. He goes on stroking her hair, feeling the tightness in his chest recede as the memory of her fall fades back again into the general background noise of his thoughts. It's never not there; just sometimes it's easier to ignore than others. "Cause I think it might help him feel a little less...lonely. I dunno. This is all kinds of not my field, we should really bring in that hotshot kid with the wings, the one who actually has some experience dealing with People Affected by Bad Shit."

"Sam Wilson."

"That's the one," he says, snapping his fingers with unnecessary drama. Her shoulders shake just a little in a tiny laugh. "Wonder if he does house calls? Ask him to come do his thing with Captain America and Captain America's scary boyfriend." 

"Who isn't sure if Captain America _wants_ to be his boyfriend anymore."

"Ohhhhh," Tony says, as things make more sense. "Lies the wind in _that_ quarter." He feels an unexpected pang of sympathy.

She nods against him. "Neither of them are...all that good at communication."

"One of them does the best suitface I've ever seen," Tony agrees. He tries it himself, glowering, and gives up: no contest, baby. "But this hot-chocolate-as-nocturnal-communication-strategy thing is promising. I like it. It's also kind of painfully adorable, you know that, right?"

Pepper sits up, sniffling, and gives him about sixty percent of a smile. "You know what else is adorable?"

"What?"

"Naming your latest discovery after me, that's what's adorable. Bucky told me. _Piperium_."

"Why, that rotten little ex-Soviet rat fink," Tony says. "I was gonna make it a thing. Champagne, roses, announcements, Stark Attempts Romantic Gesture, Renders Periodic Table Incomplete. Again. The science textbook guys hate me so much."

She hugs his neck. "Well, I think it's very sweet."

"That's me," he says, and kisses her. "I am absolutely sweet."

~

It is silent here, and dark, but it's that particular color of dark that means it is intentional. Very faintly tinged with green. The silence is broken by the regular rhythm of footsteps: two sets. The greenness grows, brightens, becomes actual illumination, as two figures walk down a narrow metal corridor to a set of doors that hiss open at their approach. The light that one of them is carrying goes out, as the doors shut behind them and the chamber wakes with its own light--still dim, but enough to make out that this is an office, with a vast monumental desk and a smaller chair in front of it. The two figures are in almost identical black uniform, but one of them seats himself behind the desk and the other settles in front of it. 

"I was told the asset was nonfunctional," says the one behind the desk. He is speaking German, a clear accentless German that gives away no hint of his origins. "I was, in fact, led to believe that the asset had been terminated in the final destruction of the ships of Project Insight. Who was responsible for confirming that status?"

"Secretary Pierce, sir," says the other, his German heavily accented with Russian. "Unfortunately the Secretary was also killed during the incident."

"I see." The light slides down leather-gloved, steepled fingers. "And no one thought to check this particularly important question before retreat was ordered?"

The Russian swallows hard, against his tight black tunic collar. "It was an oversight."

"It most certainly was. And now what is it that I am being told, that a group of foreign operatives including something matching the description of the asset was encountered in an attack on our Mayak location? An attack that has made a serious and potentially strategic impact on our production capacity? Is this intelligence to be believed?"

"It is, sir. We have three separate witnesses to the...the asset's presence. Well, two. One is not expected to regain consciousness again."

"So," says the man behind the desk, and there is a kind of veiled amusement in his voice. "Not only have we failed to keep track of our property, we have apparently left it out where just _anyone_ could pick it up, and now the tiresome Americans have it on a leash. Have we taken the indicated steps to handle this particular situation?"

"Sir, the remote programs were actuated. Any one of them should have heated the prosthetic to at least eight hundred Fahrenheit and terminated the asset within a few minutes. We received confirmation that the protocols had been run, but...we do not have confirmed termination."

"So," he repeats. "We had better look to the wetware programming, I think? Get me whoever was last in charge of the asset's calibration. Have you tracked its whereabouts at all, by chance?"

"All data indicate that it is still in New York City. Presumably with the, uh. Avengers."

"Get me those programmers," he says, again. "And give me a projection of every public event scheduled to occur in New York City in the next two weeks."

"Yes, sir." A pause. "Sir?"

"Yes?"

"We _are_ going to...attack the American group? To secure the asset?"

"We are going to do exactly that which we have to do, and nothing more. Further discussion is limited to security clearances higher than your own." A brief pause. "I believe I gave you an order?"

"--Sir, yes, sir, my apologies, sir," and he takes off his hat, bowing, and hurries away down the corridor--his green handheld lamp again the only light to be seen. 

~

Barnes shows up to lunch hoarse but not mute, and with Tony and Pepper and Banner there they have something close to a friendly twenty minutes. Later in the afternoon Natasha and Clint come back, having indulged in touristy pursuits they haven't had a lot of opportunity for. Both are carrying shopping bags, and Tony insists on a fashion show. 

The next few days are...complicated. Rogers is finally on his feet and shuffling around in what on anybody else would be baggy sweats but on him look like commercial-grade workout gear. He is visibly glad to see Bucky also ambulatory and, apparently, doing a lot better at the socialization thing: Bucky and Nat had had an argument over something to do with the preparation of waffles and both of them had lapsed into animated Russian, and when Tony demanded to be let in on the joke, both superspy-ex-assassins had just looked over at him and offered almost identical deathglowers. 

Bucky passes greasy takeout cartons politely at the dinner table and asks about laundry settings after a fruitless fifteen minutes trying to work out what is and is not permanent press. Bucky makes coffee by dint of adding boiling water to ground coffee in a saucepan and pouring the result into mugs through a strainer. 

(Both Natasha and Clint agree that the fine aromatic mud at the bottom of their cups is totally reminiscent of Istanbul. Or Cairo. Maybe both. Clint adds cinnamon to his and gives Bucky one of his small bright grins.)

Natasha takes Bucky shopping, after some persuasion and a lot of Russian and gestures; in a baseball cap and with his arm firmly hidden, and with her instincts regarding not being noticed, they manage a pretty creditable haul. When Bucky comes back out into the lounge wearing actual jeans and a shirt that fits him, instead of borrowed workout gear, there is a general intake of breath and a variety of stares. "Dang," Tony says. "You clean up pretty good, Underbed Red."

A week ago--hell, a few days ago--Bucky would have ducked his head uncomfortably and let the hair do its curtain, but now he just jams his hands in his pockets and shrugs. "Thanks, Decadent Imperialist."

Pause. A beat. Everybody turns to Tony. 

"I need that on a shirt," he says. "Also add it to my list of titles on my business cards, Ms. Potts. I mean, I thought that pretty much went without saying, but I like the ring of it."

Bucky stays where he is for a moment longer, then comes over and sits beside Steve on the couch. "You okay?" he says. 

Steve is still looking at him and blinking. "Hey, Earth to Steve."

"Oh. Uh, yeah. I'm fine. You look...you look good, Bucky. Was it bad, being out there?"

"Nah. People are a lot less perceptive than you think. And Nat's _really_ good at hiding in plain sight."

Steve remembers the kiss on the escalator. "Yeah. Uh. Yeah, she is."

"Are you sure you're okay? Does your shoulder hurt?" Bucky's been pulling his hair back into a ponytail except when he needs it as camouflage, like for shopping trips. Right now his entire face is visible, and concerned, and pointed at Steve. 

"No, it's fine." It mostly is. He keeps poking it to see if it still hurts when he pokes it. "I'm glad. That you got to be outside, without...Hydra following you. Or people chasing you with cameras."

"Ohhhh," Bucky says, and subsides on the couch beside him, tentatively reaching for his hand. Steve curls his fingers tight round Bucky's, which is encouraging. "Is _that_ what's buggin' you? People from magazines? Because frankly I have absolutely no clue how your guys are gonna spin me, so. Only thing to do there is just sit tight and wait for them to get creative."

"You're okay with all this?" Steve gestures vaguely with his free hand. Even though he's been up and about for a little while, Steve still looks miserably tired, tired enough that he maybe should still be lying down. He can't be running a temperature, Bucky thinks, the serum must have knocked that out, but right now he looks the way Bucky remembers him looking a hundred and forty pounds lighter and cresting 102: wrung out, tired almost beyond rest. "You're okay?" he says again. "With us." Us, not them. Bucky isn't sure when that changed, just that it has.

"Last time I looked you guys were, for whatever reason, on my six," Bucky tells him. "The whole bunch of you didn't turn me over to Hydra, for one thing, and you just...gave me a safe place to hide in and fixed me up, which was a lot more than I deserved. Steve, do you not...do you not know how much I owe you right now, just to be able to sit here and talk like a person?"

Steve squinches up his face the way he always has when he's about to say something meaningful, and right then Pepper calls out "On the table, guys," and he shakes himself as if he's just come out of cold water, and manufactures a smile for Bucky, pushing himself upright.

"C'mon," he says, as if Bucky hasn't heard the summons perfectly well on his own. "Dinnertime."

"Yeah." Bucky just lets Steve lead him over to the table. 

~

Days pass: the first of many fridge magnets are stuck to Bucky's arm ( _"How is this magnetic? It's not even steel!"_ ) and the first of the retaliatory notes in Cyrillic cursive are tucked where their finder absolutely does not expect them. Twice Pepper tries to haul up the courage to talk to Bucky about her own experience, and fails, because he's so obviously focused on Steve Rogers. 

Steve Rogers...continues. He eats at mealtimes, with no real appetite; he goes through basic solitary workout routines in the gym, without killing any punching bags. He doesn't leave the tower. There is a generally perceived sense that if left to his own devices he would stay in the privacy of his room, or just work Stark's Bowflex to pieces, with the same vague apologetic expression on his face. 

~

A week after Steve's transfer from the hospital, Hill and Sam Wilson duck out of an unmarked chopper on the tower's helipad. Natasha and Tony are there to hustle them inside. "Offer you folks coffee?" Tony says, but he can't really do good levity right now, his levity reserve is kind of sucking dry. 

"Tony Stark," Wilson says. "Always wanted to get a chance to meet you, talk about, oh, jetpacks and the like."

Stark shakes his hand firmly. "And so you shall. Right now--"

"Right now somebody needs to shake Rogers out of it, and you're the most qualified," Natasha says. "You'll...see what's wrong."

"You know I'm not a shrink, right? Not a psychologist, and definitely not a psychiatrist, I can't do shit other than talk."

"That's what he needs. Well, maybe being hit in the head real hard, but I don't think that's gonna solve his problems," she says. There's real worry in her eyes. Sam is capable of recognizing that, unlike the majority of the world, and his stomach goes cold. 

"See what I can do," he says. _Captain America needs my help_ was a lot easier to follow when the bad guys were identifiable as the ones shooting at you. Captain America needing his help in the absence of all but one bad guy...fuck, that was different.

"Have a word with you?" Maria Hill is saying to Stark, behind him. "It's relevant to the situation."

"And you didn't bring Coulson. I miss his discorporeal presence, I really do."

"Tony," Pepper says, as Natasha walks Sam Wilson downstairs to find Steve. "Be nice."

"I _am_ nice, it's like the basic foundation of my entire personality. What up, Agent Hill? Or should I call you Co-Director Hill?"

"We're running out of invisible time," Hill says. "Sooner or later people will put two and two and obvious things together and come up with the Winter Soldier being still around. Even if Hydra hasn't already done that, which I'm sure they have, the rest of the world is gonna catch up in a hurry. So we need to figure out who and what he is, now, and announce that ahead of the tabloids."

"Does he have to be somebody new?" Pepper asks. 

"Can he _not_ be somebody new? The Winter Soldier is...hell, he's a bunch of memes by now. There's nowhere the internet reaches that _doesn't_ know about him as the one who fought Captain America to near-death." Hill sighs. "I'll take that coffee now, actually, Stark, if you don't mind."


	16. Chapter 16

_Times of plenty, times of pain_  
 _Many coats you wore_  
 _But the folks that brought you to the boiling rain_  
 _Are gathering here once more_  
\--Tony Carey, _The Red Door_

He's thinking about Peggy. How thin and hot her hand had been in his, the fine tissue-thin skin stretched over twiglike fingers, swollen joints. He can remember that hand firm and strong, closing over his, in the ruins of a bar a lifetime ago. _I'm going after Schmidt. I'm not going to stop until all of Hydra is dead or captured._

_You won't be alone._

But he had been, in the end. Steve knows that everybody is alone in the end, everyone has to face eternity on their own. 

Peggy, looking up at him, the skull so close beneath her skin: _It's been so long. So long._ And he hadn't even had to bear the years himself, frozen in sleep, but Steve _feels_ them nonetheless, feels them soft but heavy, pressing down on him as if the air itself is tangible and thick. He is tired all the time now, tired the way he had been before the serum. Color seems to be fading out of the world--that bright sharp vivid surprising color he had never really seen before Erskine's formula repaired his faulty vision. He is dimly aware that the others are worried, and wishes he knew how to tell them not to be; wishes he were not the way he is, a disappointment. 

What had she said to him? _The world has changed. Sometimes...the best thing we can do is start over._

Had Peggy known, then? Had she known S.H.I.E.L.D. was rotten at the core, that the organization she and Howard Stark had built was nothing more than a front for Hydra? 

He ought to see her. For many reasons. The idea of going back to DC, even on one of Stark's helicopters, even if he doesn't have to _do_ anything like drive or catch a train, seems insurmountably exhausting, makes his chest tighten with anxiety just thinking about it. He ought to see her and he doesn't think he can, and that is another disappointment, another thing he is not doing right. Dimly Steve remembers hitting punching bags hard enough to split them, and wonders how he ever had the energy.

He's sitting on the bed looking out over Manhattan and not really seeing it, not really seeing much of anything. When somebody knocks on the door he jumps a little. 

"Yeah?"

"Hey, man." The voice is unexpected; Steve turns to see Sam Wilson standing in the doorway. "Can I come in?"

"Sure." Sam looks taken aback, and for a moment Steve thinks maybe he's forgotten to do something obvious like put on pants, but no, he's in the shapeless grey sweats he's been wearing for a while now. "How come you're here?" he asks. Maybe Stark is going to build him better wings. 

"To see you, man. You look _terrible_." He comes into the room, shuts the door behind him, hooks over a chair. Steve blinks. 

"I do?"

"You do." Sam turns the chair backward, sits down with his arms folded on the back, and looks so intently at him that Steve hunches a little. "Wanna talk about it?"

"Not really."

"Figured. I think you kind of need to, though. Your friends are a little freaked out."

"Sorry," he says. 

"You don't have to apologize, man. You're not well. This isn't your fault."

Which is patently false. Everything is his fault. "I'm okay," he says. 

"Have you seen yourself in a mirror lately? You got a matched set of Samsonite under your eyes, you're the color of old milk, and you've lost a bunch of weight. C'mon, Steve. How long have you been feeling like shit?"

Goddamnit, he isn't going to go away. Steve bends over, resting his face in his hands. It's easier when he doesn't have to look at Sam looking at him. "Awhile. Since...I guess since the whole mess in DC happened."

"But it's gotten worse recently?"

He nods without looking up. "Cause before you found your friend I don't remember you looking like this," Sam says. "You weren't _happy_ , but I don't think you were miserable."

"It's not his fault."

"Didn't say it was. But finding him again, and the whole process of his recovery, that has to have stirred up a lot of shit for you. He's doing a hell of a lot better than you are right now."

He just hunches further. "I know."

Sam doesn't say anything, and the silence stretches and becomes unbearable. Without really meaning to, he blurts out "I don't know who he is now and I don't know who _I_ am either."

"That makes sense," Sam tells him. 

"No it doesn't, how could it? I'm supposed to be Captain America. That's what I _am_ but now I don't...know how to be."

"Well, seeing as how you basically found out that the organization you'd been fighting _for_ was actually a front for the organization you'd been fighting _against_ since nineteen-forty-whatever, I can kind of understand why a little identity crisis might be in the cards." Sam's voice is warm. "In the middle of the action it's a lot easier not to think about stuff, just _do_ what has to be done, but when things are over, when it's quiet, that's when you start having trouble fitting the pieces together."

"It felt better," he says, still hiding behind his hands. "When we were in Mayak, fighting. Felt like I could do the job. Then--"

"Then you took a bullet for him."

"I didn't think. I didn't have to think, it was just--" Again he breaks off, takes a deep breath. "It was just that I couldn't fail him _again_. What you said about Riley--that there was nothing you could do, like you were there just to watch him fall--there hasn't been more than a handful of days since 1944 that I _haven't_ seen Bucky fall from that train. I couldn't let him down again."

"And you didn't," Sam says. "You saved his life. You saved it a couple times, actually. You found his dumb ass hiding out and brought him here, and you got him through the conditioning."

He shakes his head. "That wasn't me. That was Bucky. All I did was...was try not to get in the way." He remembers Sam asking him _what makes you happy?_ and not having any idea what to say. "He came back on his own. He remembers it all, but he's not...he's not the Soldier anymore. He fought with us at Mayak as part of the team. They trust him. I trust him."

"But?" 

"But nothing." Steve presses the heels of his hands against his eyes; burning gold geometric shapes fizzle in the darkness. "He's doing great, he's even started to snark back at Stark, he doesn't hide behind his hair all the time. He and Natasha talk Russian to one another and they...they spar, and it's amazing to watch. It's nothing like how he used to move. You can tell they learned from the same teachers. She's the only one who really knows what he went through."

Sam doesn't say anything for long enough that he takes away his hands and looks miserably up at him, and is surprised to find an expression of profound sympathy.

"What?" he says. 

"After you were shot," Sam says, "while they were digging the slug out of you, Natasha called me. I got there as fast as I could. When they told us you were gonna be okay, I went to go find him. Not gonna lie, it was weird as shit seeing the guy who shot Fury and ripped the wheel out of my car just chilling in a waiting room, but, Steve, I have never seen anybody look so worried in my whole life. Ever. He was kind of a mess himself, the ride back from Russia had been pretty rough on everybody, but he was straight-up terrified for you. That dude thinks the sun rises and sets behind your face, okay? You. Not Natasha Romanoff, not anybody else in the universe, but you."

Steve can feel himself going pink. "I was so scared," he says, "for so long, for him. I don't know who he is, and I'm not good enough."

"Bull _shit_ you're not good enough." There's an edge to Sam's voice that surprises him; he looks up again. "Listen to me, okay, Cap? The way you're feeling right now has nothing to do with your worth, or who or what you are. It's not your fault you're so unhappy. You haven't done anything wrong to deserve these feelings."

"Then why can't I stop it?" he asks, miserably. "I know they're worried, they keep...trying to help, and I hate how they look at one another around me, I just want it all to go away. I...kind of hate everything, right now, even Bucky, and what the hell does _that_ make me?"

"Someone who's depressed," Sam says. "It's an illness. It's no more your fault than it would be if you had the flu. It's a lot more common than people think, especially with veterans. And especially with people who've gone through something as emotionally bruising as, oh, your last few months have been."

Steve looks at him, mute. He shrugs. "I know, you're Captain America, you're a superhero, you got the big freedom frisbee and the star on your chest and everything, but none of that means you can't be vulnerable to this kind of thing. It will get better."

" _When?_ " Steve asks. 

"There's no fixed timeline. But the first thing you gotta do is accept that it's not your fault, and that it's not something you can snap out of. Your body might heal super-fast, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't go for your mind as well." He taps his temple with a fingertip. "Give yourself some time to deal with all the shit you've just been through. And let your friends help. You're not alone, there are people who care for you--and one incredibly scary dude with a metal arm who is crazy about you. Let them in, okay?"

He looks down at his hands, takes a deep breath. Some of the tightness in his chest seems to have eased, just in the last few minutes. "I'll try," he says. 

"Good." Sam gets up. "Do me two favors?"

"Huh?"

"First off, man, how long have you been wearing those clothes?"

He starts to say "Huh?" again and then sniffs at himself. "Um."

"Hit the shower and _then_ show me around this place, because it is _incredible_."

~

 

When Steve and Wilson join the group gathered round pizza boxes in the lounge, Bucky is stupidly glad to see that there's even just a flicker of animation in him. He's still too pale and he still looks exhausted and unhappy, but there's less of that weird indefinable sense of disconnection, of not being all the way present. 

He's also had a shave and is wearing clean clothes, which probably goes some way toward explaining the general improvement, and Bucky doesn't know what Wilson did or said that none of _them_ could have done or said but he absolutely does not care right now.

"Hey, guys," Stark says, waving a slice of pepperoni. "Come help us decide on a new name for our friend here. I vote for Bedhead October, cause Red Scare is kind of out of date."

Wilson snickers. Pepper, beside Tony, gives his shoulder a light smack. "What he means is come help yourself to pizza. Sam, did he give you the tour?"

"He sure did," Sam says, grinning. "I liked the garage best. I didn't know you could have more than one Bugatti, I thought there was like a law about that, one per billionaire or something."

"Vulgar excess is a thing I do well," Stark agrees, blithely. "You and I need to have a talk about wings. From what I could see on the news footage there's at least five points where the design could be improved. Like the name, though. Falcon. Sexy." 

Hill and the others move along to give them room on the couch. Bucky watches the brief hesitation before Steve comes forward, and then is surprised and very glad when Steve decides to sit next to him and reach for his hand. He's deliberately stopped himself being touchy-feely with Steve the past couple of days, since it didn't seem to be all that welcome, but it hasn't been easy. The others talk over them. He pays no attention, just curls his fingers round Steve's and leans in to murmur in his ear. "Are you okay?"

"No," Steve says, just as quietly. Bucky's chest aches. "I'm not, but...I guess I need some help getting there."

"I'll do anything. Anything you need."

Steve nods slightly, and the fingers laced through his tighten a little. "Can we talk later?"

"Course we can," Bucky says, and when Steve leans a bit closer against his shoulder, he feels a little of the anxiety of the past week ease its tightness round his ribs. 

~

They don't end up deciding on anything. Hill isn't happy; but she agrees that they can probably keep things under wraps for a little while longer if everybody's careful. "I'll be in touch," she promises. "Coulson and I need to talk to Fury. We'll probably be back in a couple of days, if you can just lay low and not do anything noticeable."

"Me _not_ being noticeable is gonna raise suspicions," Stark says, and then waves a hand. "Nah, nah. I know what you mean. Promise nobody's gonna go streaking down Fifth Avenue carrying a sign saying The Winter Soldier Is Back."

"Good," says Hill. "You ready, Sam?"

"Yup. Steve, you stay in touch, okay? Skype me."

Steve nods. He hasn't actually let go of Bucky for more than a couple of minutes since his reappearance. They watch Hill and Wilson climb into the chopper and lift off. There's a moment or two of silence and then Tony, Pepper, Clint, and Natasha all start to speak at once. 

"I think I--"

"We should--"

"It's time for--"

"Maybe--"

Pepper shakes her head, laughing. "I think what we all mean is that we have stuff to do that is located not in this room right now, right?"

"Couldn't have said it better myself, Ms. Potts. There are absolutely pressing matters to be taken care of elsewhere right at this exact moment."

Steve is in decent enough shape to roll his eyes, even if he's blushing. The others depart in a hurry, and he thunks his head on Bucky's shoulder and just sighs. 

Bucky hugs him tight, tight. He can feel Steve's ribs too easily; with his jacked-up metabolism, not eating much for the past few days has already taken its toll. It feels ridiculously good when Steve hugs him back, and they stand like that, together, for a long while before unwrapping from each other. "C'mon," Bucky says, tugging him gently over to sit down. "Talk to me."

He does. At first it's visibly painful, winching words up a little at a time; but slowly the effort involved seems to lessen, the sentences coming more freely. A lot of it is surprisingly, chillingly familiar. In the time between his rescue from Zola and his fall from the train Bucky had struggled with similar feelings: who was this new Steve, and who was Bucky himself now, now that Zola's chemicals ran in his veins? If Erskine's serum had only amplified what was already there in Steve's character, and Zola's was a knockoff version, what had it amplified inside _him_? Because there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of nobility or selfless courage down there to begin with, not like with Steve. Bucky had been scared of what he'd become, and that he had had to hide from _everybody_ , particularly Steve. 

Someone had described him as "haunted," in those years, and it was pretty accurate. 

"...and you were just...you were different, you moved differently, you could do things I'd never be able to, and I watched you and Natasha," Steve is saying, and Bucky can't work out what he means. "I remember fighting Batroc, on the _Lemurian Star_. He was good--better than good, he was _graceful_ , there were some effortless gymnastic moves he just wove into his style, but I'd never seen anyone fight as beautifully as Natasha does until I saw you."

Bucky blinks at him. 

"You guys...you looked amazing, and I knew I could never hope to match that."

Slowly an astonishing suspicion begins to take shape. "You...Steve, you thought I...that we...Oh my God."

"Well...I told her once when she asked me why I didn't date people that it was tough to find somebody with shared life experience, and you and she had some of that, even if it was godawful," Steve says, eyes huge and owlish, and Bucky thinks of Pepper Potts and her unquestioning sympathy, and _does_ take him by the shoulders and shake him. 

Steve blinks, and his head wobbles, and Bucky can't bear it and just hugs him tight enough to hurt. "Steve Rogers, I love the hell out of you but you can be dense as frigging fruitcake at times. No, I do not have and never have had romantic intentions toward Natasha Romanoff. Okay? She's an amazing person, I think we both know that, but it's never not been you. Ever."

"Oh," says Steve, and then "Good," and then he pulls away a little, enough to slide his hands up Bucky's back and pull the elastic out of his hair; it falls down in its familiar curtain, but right now it's hiding both their faces. When he kisses Bucky it's tentative at first, as if he's not completely convinced he's allowed to do this, but it does not take them long before he is persuaded. 

~

"You think he'd have trouble finding a parking spot for a Bugatti in DC?" Tony asks, on the phone with Bruce. "I mean, I do have two of 'em, it's not like I can be driving both at once or anything."

"Insurance would be a killer," Bruce says. He's smiling: it's audible in his voice. "Make him a new set of wings instead. You know you're getting itchy to start designing stuff again after Barnes' new arm."

"I'm always itchy to design stuff, it's a chronic condition. You should know that. Oh, by the way, they shot down all my suggestions for new superhero names for Barnes."

"Somehow I am not a hundred percent surprised to hear it. Between Hill and Coulson and Fury I'm sure they'll come up with something."

"Yeah, but it won't be as awesome as anything _I_ said. Seriously, I don't know what he did, but whatever it was it seems to have yanked Rogers out of total mope mode." He doesn't think one conversation is going to fix Rogers; he knows too much about misery to believe that. But he's pretty sure whatever Wilson said had been the first step. 

"You mean you weren't listening in over the household intercom?"

"Please. I do have a couple of ethics lying around somewhere, they raise their small molelike heads every now and then. You should quit doing whatever you're doing and come see him for yourself, though, make sure there's nothing actually _wrong_ wrong with him, he's lost some weight and he's generally been looking like half a ton of freezer-burned crap."

"You know perfectly well what I'm doing, I told you multiple times I had a meeting. I should be done this evening, though, I can be back tonight."

"That will be acceptable, Dr. Banner. We did pizza for lunch, Pep's probably gonna make us eat something with a nutrient in it, but we can make s'mores after if you like."

~

The signal has been run through multiple levels of encryption and bounced from satellite to satellite on its way to a receiver located in New Jersey, not all that very far from the crater that had been Camp Lehigh. Despite the precautions taken to protect the transmission, both parties take pains to limit specific detail. 

"The asset's location is confirmed," one voice says, in German. It's flat and inhuman, the result of the scrambler. "Analysis indicates security at the source is handled by a private civilian system. It does not appear to be detained or limited in its movement."

"Good. Continue on the assumption that it has been fitted with a replacement prosthetic, the capabilities of which are currently unknown. Other parameters have not changed." The second voice is lower, possibly older, and has a cold edge to it.

"Yes, sir. Priority objective remains to secure and extract the asset?"

"If possible. If not, terminate. Based on our records, electrocution should render it incapacitated long enough to allow for extraction and recalibration, but should that not be feasible..."

"Understood."

"Its performance in recent years has been somewhat problematic. Loss of the asset would of course be regrettable, but would also represent the end of a historically complex and resource-intensive project. The Cold War is over; the world for which it was designed has moved on."

"Yes, sir. And the others? The Americans?"

"A certain amount of collateral damage is unavoidable in an operation of this kind. However, the final solution to the issue of the Avengers represents an objective whose scope is beyond that of this mission."

"What about civilians?"

"Exercise your own judgment." Even through the scrambler there is a certain chilly amusement audible in the voice. "Once the asset is secured--either way, breathing or not--execute extraction protocol Delta and proceed to the rendezvous point."

"Yes, sir. Hail Hydra."

"Hail Hydra," says the cold voice, and the signal cuts out.


	17. Chapter 17

_Waves of laughter, waves of hope_  
 _Break on distant shores_  
 _As you leave behind you the smell and the smoke_  
 _Of a short and final war_  
 _Through the red door_

_And it all comes to this_  
 _And it all starts once more_  
 _There are shapes in the mist_  
 _calling you_...  
\--Tony Carey, _The Red Door_

It is a _beautiful_ day. 

Afterwards Tony will claim he absolutely suspected _something_ was going to go wrong simply because it was such a gorgeous day and everybody looked their very best, but nobody will give this much credence. Looking out over the crowd of expectant faces, feeling the concerted excitement, he is _on_.

"Ladies, gentlemen, nonbinary individuals, and anyone else who happens to be listening," he says into the mike, grinning that grin, arms spread wide. "It is my pleasure, my privilege, and my honor to be able to reveal to you the completely new, improved, and expanded Howard and Maria Stark Terminal of Grand Central Station!"

For once there aren't any giant novelty scissors. He brandishes the pair of perfectly ordinary shears with the panache of a magician about to perform his best trick, and with a _snip_ the red ribbon falls in two halves. A thousand shutters click. Then the applause begins, and it is loud enough that the sound of the gunshot barely even registers. The round impacts the podium straight on and ricochets wildly, amid screams. Tony, Pepper, and their combined security detail hit the floor. 

"Really?" he's saying, even through the yelling over walkie-talkies and the shouts and cries of fear. "Really? I can't have _one_ fucking moment without some try-hard idiots dropping in to screw everything up?"

Pepper's got her hands over her head, lying beside him on the floor. "Whoever's in charge of security detail just got fired," she yells. 

"That would be Happy."

"Damn. Okay, well, whoever's second in command of security detail just got fired." Her voice is as light as she can make it but he hears the strain under the words. 

"JARVIS," Tony says. 

"Working on it, sir. There appear to be unmarked vehicles approaching rapidly in all directions, and I do not believe they contain New York's finest."

"Who the hell--" he says, and looks up at the glass curve of Stark Tower. Distantly a gleaming speck is visible, getting bigger and bigger in a hurry as it hurtles toward them. More gunshots ring out, and Tony knows people are almost certainly dying, and the bright white-hot _anger_ which surges through him feels like electricity. He rolls over on his back and lifts his hands into the air as the speck turns into a suitcase-sized metal object and then separates into curves and planes and angles of armor, starting with each hand and forming itself as it moves down his arms, encasing him in seconds. The faceplate comes down and locks into place and he's back in the black-and-glowing world where he feels the most like himself. He stands, ignoring the gunfire.

"Get her out of here," he says to the bodyguards. "Now." 

"Tony--"

"Now, Pep." He fires the thrusters before she can respond, and the chaos of the crowd falls away beneath him. In the suit's targeting display, the positions of the shooters light up bright red, and tiny but highly potent missiles rotate out of their bays on his forearms and shoulders. 

"I don't know who the fuck you are," he says, alone inside the helmet, "but you crashed the _wrong_ party, guys." 

~

They're watching it live on the huge TV in the lounge. When the first shot is fired every one of them is on their feet at once, instinct acting first before organization takes over. "JARVIS?" Bruce demands. "What's going on?"

"Sensors indicate multiple shooters spread throughout the outskirts of the crowd," the AI says, sounding terser than usual. "Mark 46 deployed."

On the screen they can just about make out Tony reaching up and the metal of the suit forming itself around him, looking almost liquid; then Iron Man is in the air and firing back. The picture abruptly swings and bounces as the news camera person decides to run for it. 

"Who..." Bruce doesn't have to finish the thought. Beside Steve, Bucky curls his hands into fists. 

"It's Hydra," he says. "Looks like my ride finally got here after all."

"You're not going out there," Steve says, and everybody notices that he seems to be standing up a little straighter. "Bucky, you are _not_ going out there, we can handle Hydra--"

"People are gonna die, Steve. I can't let that happen."

Over the live feed--and through the windows of the tower overlooking the station itself--they can hear the amplified voice, deliberately flattened and modulated to sound more menacing: "THIS IS HYDRA. UNLESS THE ASSET KNOWN AS THE WINTER SOLDIER IS PRODUCED, WE WILL CONTINUE TO TARGET CIVILIANS." It pauses. "YOUR OWN HEROIC AVENGERS HAVE BEEN SHELTERING THE WINTER SOLDIER."

General consternation and uproar on the TV news feeds. Bucky walks over to the windows and looks down at the mess. "JARVIS?" he asks, conversationally. 

"Yes, Sergeant?"

"Tell Stark I'm gonna need a lift."

Steve is the closest to him but even Steve is not fast enough to react before Bucky shatters the window panel with a single blow and jumps out into space. 

~

He hasn't let himself really have time to think this through, and the stretch of freefall is just about long enough for him to reconsider the wisdom of this move before a streak of metal and fire swoops alongside him and he is caught, an arm like an iron bar round his chest, and no longer falling but hovering. "Jesus Christ," Stark says. "And people have the nerve to call _me_ overly dramatic. The hell do you think you're doing, Underbed Red?"

The impact had driven most of the breath from his lungs. "My...duty...for God and my country." Bucky wheezes out the Boy Scout oath, grinning. "Take me down there, Stark."

"What, you expect me to just hand you over to Hydra like a goddamn Christmas present?"

"No," he says. "Get the people out of here. Get as many people safe as you can. I gotta do something."

"Barnes, for God's sake, this isn't just about you. What about Rogers? What do you think your little stunt is doing to him?"

Bucky shakes his head. "He'll understand. I gotta do this. I'm...done hiding. I'm done with secrets. I'm done with Hydra. Time to make that clear."

"I can't believe I'm doing this," Stark mutters, but the ground draws up beneath them. People scatter in all directions as Stark sets him on his feet with what Bucky considers remarkable gentleness. "Barnes, your arm represents a hell of an investment on the part of Stark Industries. Try not to fuck it up."

Bucky knows exactly what he is not saying, and just nods. His hair blows loose around his face in the wind of Stark's thrusters as Iron Man roars back up into the sky, and sound seems to recede from the world entirely, leaving a sort of ringing echo in his ears. He walks forward and the people get out of his way, retreating to leave an open path between him and what he now sees is a black unmarked Hydra van. Inside, he _knows_ there will be needles and reinforced restraints and a scaled-down, mobile version of the chair. 

Hydras coalesce round the limits of his vision, black tactical gear and blank faceless helmets rendering them indistinguishable from each other. A small constellation of bright red stars appears on his chest, clashing with the lettering on his sweatshirt, which he had borrowed from Steve and which says ARMY on the front. He keeps walking. The laser sights swarm and jitter as they adjust for his movement. When he does stop, alone, unarmed, facing a squadron of Hydra soldiers, he stands perfectly still. The news cameras focus, zoom in. This is live now all over the world, beamed from satellite to satellite, streaming online. It is very much larger than just Bucky Barnes. 

"Asset reporting," he says, in Russian. The Hydras glance at one another. The back doors of the van open and a man in Hydra uniform with an electric lash in each gloved hand steps down to face him. 

When the Hydra man speaks it is a calculated, cadenced line of syllables that tug hard at the back of his mind, waking a specific response: _stand down and wait for orders_. But like most tricks, once it's revealed how it is done, the result fails to impress. Bucky feels the hook in his mind give that sharp yank, and it is no more now than the sting of a wasp: painful, but not unbearable. He lets his head droop and his hands open. 

Another order in Russian, and the swarm of red dots on his chest vanishes one by one. The man with the electric whips takes a step closer, and another step, and Bucky is not surprised when the long flexible lashes flash and crackle into life _exactly_ at the same time several of the Hydras stiffen and slowly topple sideways. He can't see Barton or Romanoff, but he is grateful for their marksmanship. The electric prods hum and flare blue light, closer, now describing vertical slashes as the man tests their reach and balance. Closer. He grits his teeth, waiting, and when they finally do hiss-crack through the air and wrap around him and the shock tries to tighten all his muscles in mindless surge Bucky's arm _does not_ go dead and useless; through all that pain he lifts his head--he can smell the tips of his hair beginning to singe--and forces himself forward. One step. Two. The man with the prods is first surprised and then frightened, and then--when Bucky closes the distance and wraps his arcing, flaring left hand round his throat--not actually able to scream. 

Through all the blue-lit buzzing agony, through the gathering certainty that he is running out of time, Bucky is aware of the years of frozen obeisance and the weight of the things he has done, and as he has done once before, he lifts the Hydra up by his neck until the glossy boots lose contact with the street, until he can feel the man's whole body hanging from his metal hand. He does not have to listen to the words the Hydra has no breath to speak: he can read his lips. "Who am I?" he asks, as he has already asked once before. 

The Hydra's contorted lips frame one word: _Asset_.

"Wrong," he says. "I'm not your asset." Each syllable takes more effort than he is sure he can bear, but he says it anyway: "I'm the Winter Soldier." _I am more than what you made me._

And instead of simply snapping the man's neck--still moving through teeth-cracking pain with the blue glare and crackle of electrical discharge all around him--Bucky draws back his other hand and hits him hard enough to feel bone shatter beneath his fist. The electric whips fall to the ground, their light finally extinguished, and Bucky drops his handful of still-breathing Hydra on top of them. 

Steaming, smoking, he stays for a long moment with his head bowed, trying to get his breath back. Sound sloshes back into the world. All around him, things are happening. Voices. People moving. Someone with a microphone, the glaring light of a camera in his eyes. _Would you repeat that for the viewing public?_

"Yeah," he says, pushing the hair out of his face. Definitely frizzled at the tips here and there, and Steve's sweatshirt is a tattered and burned writeoff. He wonders how much voltage he just took. "I'm not Hydra. I'm not the asset. I'm not dead. My name is Bucky Barnes. And I'm the Winter Soldier."

The silence after this series of tiny statements is choking. It's broken by the whine of thrusters as Iron Man drops down to land on the street beside him. Bucky turns to look into the expressionless faceplate, not knowing what to expect. 

"Well said." Stark's suit-voice is metallic, but Bucky can hear the warmth. "Even if you did steal my bit. You're also an Avenger as of two minutes ago, executive decision on my part. I'd tell you to suit up but I think we're a little bit past that stage right now, so just put this on and let's clean up this mess."

Held very delicately out to him between the suit's thumb and forefinger is a sleek little earpiece. Bucky takes it, wordless, and sets it in his ear, and Iron Man nods ever so slightly--and then roars back up into the sky.

Time does that snapshot thing again. Bucky can only remember moments, images, not a continuous stream of events: he's punching Hydras in the face, he's on top of a car with a Hydra rifle picking off a shooter aiming at Barton, he's back-to-back with Natasha. Steve is there, shielding people in the face. The Hulk uses a Hydra to swat a clump of other Hydras out of his way, roaring. Barton takes out one of the black vans with an exploding arrow. Iron Man blasts another to slag. Most of the people have fled the scene, with the news crews trying to balance the instinct to get the hell out of there with the lust for potential Pulitzer material. The pain of his burns is barely noticeable through the blaze of adrenaline; Bucky feels _alive_ the way he hasn't since...

...since the Howling Commandos, he realizes, watching Steve bounce his shield off three Hydras and punch another one off his feet. It's like that. It's the same exhilaration, the same intensity, the same awareness of belonging to something that's more than the sum of its parts. Over the comm channel Steve sounds just the way he had back then: focused, determined, and entirely in charge. In Mayak he'd been functional as Captain America but having to work at it; now decisions and strategy seem effortless and fluid. Bucky watches a moment longer, and then ducks out of the way of a fresh hail of bullets and moves to return fire. 

He has no idea how long the fight has been going on when Stark comes over the radio, the normally casual voice sharp with fear. "JARVIS says they've got Pepper, whoever's closest to Vanderbilt and 43rd get the hell over there _right now_ , I'm pinned down but working on it--" 

The signal crackles and cuts out. Bucky, taking cover behind a bullet-riddled taxi, looks up. "I'm at Park and 42nd. On my way." 

Bullets pluck and whine all around him as he runs for it, left arm held up to shield his face, leaping over debris and dodging between cars. One round grazes his shoulder, another draws a bloody line along his thigh, but he barely even notices, everything subsumed beneath the need to reach Pepper. As he gets closer he hears screams. _No_ , he thinks, _no, Hydra doesn't get to do this, not to her, not now after all of this_ , and pushes himself harder.

It seems to take forever, this run, and when Bucky vaults over an overturned police cruiser and finally sees the black-clad Hydras and their van he thinks he is too late: _oh, Christ, she's on fire, they set her on_ fire, _what the fuck--_ and everything freezes in a moment of horror; then he hears the screams again. 

It's not Pepper screaming. 

Bucky stares openmouthed, unable to believe what he's seeing: a woman made out of fire, her coppery hair rising and floating all around her face, her white suit charring black, her skin mottled and glowing with furnace-heat, her eyes brilliant pinpoints of orange light. The black heaps on the ground around her feet are moaning, smoking Hydras. Even as he watches, another of them _reaches out to her_ , to grab her wrist, and Bucky winces at the flare and shriek as his hand bursts into flame.

"Don't...touch...me," she says, and that breaks some kind of spell; the remaining Hydras turn and run. Bucky only just has the presence of mind to hold out his left fist in time for one of them to run into it. 

"...Pepper?" he says, slow, disbelieving, and she stops looking at her burning hands and blinks at him and suddenly the fire dwindles and fades away to nothing. She's Pepper again, disheveled and smudged with soot, her clothes noticeably the worse for wear, but no longer a figure out of some fantastic mythology. "Are...you okay?"

She gives him a rueful, sheepish look. "Well," she says. "I've got a condition." 

Bucky can't seem to move. Pepper looks around at the incapacitated Hydras, sighs, and takes a step toward him--and then wobbles and nearly falls when one 6-inch Louboutin heel collapses. She catches her balance, hopping awkwardly, and that snaps whatever's holding him still; he hurries forward, offering her an arm to lean on. "Goddamnit," she says, holding the broken shoe. "I literally _just_ bought these for today. You think we can sue Hydra for damages?"

He can't help a startled little laugh. In the remaining heel she's taller than he is, and she looks down at him with a smile that turns into a frown as she gets a closer look. "Oh my God, are you okay? You look like someone put you in a blender."

"I'm fine," he says, because it's true. 

"You're _bleeding_."

"Oh. Well, yeah. But I'm fine anyway."

"He totally is," says another voice, and Iron Man touches down, the suit's faceplate opening. "He's just joined the Avengers, he's done the most spectacular public live-on-TV bridge-burning I have ever personally witnessed, and he's got a really awesome metal arm. Definition of 'fine'."

Bucky hadn't even heard him approach, still too amazed by what he'd just seen. A moment later Clint and Natasha appear, leaning on one another; he's limping and she's got an arm in a makeshift sling, but both of them are smiling. Bruce, no longer green and monosyllabic, follows them. Bucky looks around, slowly realizing that the gunfire has stopped, the battle is over. 

Stark nudges him out of the way, takes Pepper in his arms, and pauses for a moment looking into her face before dipping her in a credible reproduction of the Times Square V-J day kiss. 

"I knew he was going to do that," Barton says. "Called it." Beside him Natasha rolls her eyes and hands over a folded $10 bill. Bucky is conscious of a desire to sit down on the ground and laugh and laugh and laugh, and when a minute later Steve arrives, scowling, somewhat bruised and battered but in one piece, he thinks he may actually pass out from such desperate, intense, glowing gladness.

"You," Steve says, poking Bucky in the middle of the chest, "are _never_ allowed to jump without a chute, ever again. Captain's orders. Understood?"

"Yessir," he says, and Steve's ferocious scowl lasts just a moment longer before turning into the kind of smile Bucky wasn't sure he'd ever see again; and then Steve is hugging him so tight his ribs creak, and the shrill pain of burns and bruises matters not at all. 

Natasha is the first to join them, wrapping her arms as far as she can reach round Steve and Bucky; then Pepper, then Tony and Clint and finally Bruce, and all of them stand like that, holding each other, needing this more than words right now. Tony breaks the moment, because he is Tony, and when they let go Bucky thinks he can still feel that hug; that he may always be able to feel it, and he can't help smiling. 

"You know what?" Pepper says, looking up at the damaged front of the brand-new terminal building. "I am one hundred percent done with this public appearance, Mr. Stark. Can we go home?"

"Hydra owes me a new building facade _and_ a new crowning moment of philanthropic awesome. And you owe me a window, Barnes. I don't know why we can't have nice things." He scoops Pepper into his arms. "Thank you for flying Stark Airways. Our first-class cabin has a capacity of one. The rest of you are gonna have to take the stairs, sorry about that."

"He's not sorry at all," Barton says as they watch Iron Man soar away. "I just find intellectual dishonesty so unattractive, you know?"

Natasha prods him in the ribs. "C'mon. Before the news people descend."

~

The day after the second Battle of New York, the _Daily Bugle_ publishes a series of iconic photographs by "P. Parker" which go viral almost at once. There's the shot of Bruce Banner in shredded clothes sitting on a heap of debris with Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton; there's the shot of Iron Man in flight with Pepper Potts in his arms, one shoe missing, smudged and scorched and still so beautiful; but the one which is reblogged the most, saved and tweeted and emailed and plastered all over the internet, is the shot of Captain America and the Winter Soldier leaning on one another, arms around each other's shoulders, trudging away from the camera through the dust and smoke of the battlefield. Their heads, one dark, one fair, are touching. The caption underneath is just the title of a le Carré novel: _the spy who came in from the cold._


	18. Chapter 18

_Back when the world was young_  
_We were favorite sons_  
_And we ran proud and_  
_Straight and often_  
_And that can never be undone_  
_Here's the rest of it_  
_Make the best of it_  
_And you know we'll fight our battles_  
_'Till our battles are all won_  
\--Tony Carey, _I Feel Good_

_He's no good for you_  
_I've heard that often enough_  
_He's got icicles where people have their eyes..._

_And I want to be there, baby_  
_It's been a little bit crazy lately_  
_Think I want to settle down_  
_And I want you along_  
_I want to breathe the air again, baby_  
_Let the good life come and take me_  
_'Cause anywhere with you_  
_Could never be wrong_  
\--Tony Carey, _I Want To Be There_

_And he's waiting for the winter_...

~

"You said," Hill repeats, "and I quote, 'I promise nobody's going to go streaking down Fifth Avenue carrying a sign saying The Winter Soldier is Back'."

"Well, nobody did." Tony has her on the big display in the lounge. He's sprawled on the couch looking as smug as he generally does when some great big public mess has been made and he isn't the one who has to clean it up. "Technically nobody was streaking at all, or at least not that I saw. Fully clothed all the way. And it wasn't Fifth, it was Park."

"Stop nitpicking. The fact remains that that display caused the biggest headache we've had to deal with since Insight. So far we've been able to convince them not to arrest him on as many charges as they can think of, but it is _not_ easy, Stark. Half of Congress wants him in Guantanamo."

"They can't have him," Tony says. "I didn't go through all that goddamn drama for nothing, Co-Director. Besides, if they want to do that, then they're gonna have to reopen Romanoff's case as well, and she knocked that out from under them on live TV. This is the biggest human-interest story to hit the networks since Rogers got defrosted."

On one of the other screens he's flipping through TV channels. Bill O'Reilly, frothing and banging his fist on his desk: _he's a goddamn Soviet assassin! A war criminal! The failed Obama administration is considering granting him amnesty? What's next, pardoning Bin Laden? This is grounds for impeachment!_ CNN going with the other side of it: _Captain America's long-lost friend and comrade returns from the dead; when we come back, an expert in the psychology of grief will be with us to explore what Cap might be going through emotionally at this time._ The BBC, discussing ethical implications of brainwashing and the new involuntary iteration of _glasnost_ and _perestroika_ flooding the international community since the revelation of Hydra's role within S.H.I.E.L.D. and Natasha's secret-sharing infodump: _The world has changed._

_Got that right, babe,_ Tony thinks. "What do you want me to do about it?" he says to Hill. 

She sighs. She looks almost evanescently tired, and Tony is not for the first time very glad he doesn't have her job. "Just...try to stop anything else happening for a little while? Get him to lay low and not cause any international incidents while we work this out."

"I'll try," he says. "He's not under house arrest, though. If he wants to go walking around in the world I'm not gonna stop him."

Hill sighs again. "Can you at least try and advise caution?"

"Not something I'm known for, but hell, for you I'll stretch a point." He salutes her with his glass. "I'll talk to him about not hitting the strip clubs all at once. Ease into it gradually."

She rolls her eyes, but there's the edges of a smile there. "Thank you, Mr. Stark."

Tony waves a hand and the Skype window closes. "JARVIS, where are they, anyhow?"

"Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes are in the gym, sir. I advised against it given the fact that they are both recovering from injuries, but they insisted on sparring."

"Good sparring or oh-shit sparring?"

"I am not entirely clear on the limitations of the criteria you list, sir, but Agent Romanoff is observing and does not appear to be alarmed."

Nat never appears to be alarmed, Tony thinks, getting up. She suitfaces almost as well as Barnes does. Still, he hurries. 

He sees at once what Nat sees, and relaxes, standing beside her and watching through the glass wall. It's not the Winter Soldier and Captain America locked in struggle. It's not Steve scared of hurting Bucky, or of triggering flashbacks; it's not Bucky holding back because he himself is scared of what he might do. It's...two guys in a sparring match. Two guys who happen to be, okay, Tony qualifies the thought, _ripped as hell_ , and who probably shouldn't be doing this right now on account of one of them has electrical burns all over his chest and right arm and the other one sports a bunch of bruises, cuts, and scrapes, _but_ who are having a good time nonetheless.

Nat looks up at him. "Let them," she says. "They need this."

"Was not thinking of getting involved." Tony raises his hands. He's reasonably strong and fast, for a regular guy, but minus the suit either one of the men in the gym could pound him to paté without noticeable effort. "Stay there, I gotta go get something."

In a couple of minutes he's back with two notebooks and a marker. "We're judging for creativity as well as form," he tells her. 

A little while later, when Steve and Bucky are both flat on their backs on the mat, panting and sweaty and grinning, he taps on the glass wall and holds up a score of 9. Beside him, Nat only rates them a 7.5. 

Steve looks at them, and then at Bucky, whose hair is coming out of his ponytail, and back at the judges' panel, and just flops back on the mat in helpless laughter. The change in him is startling. Tony knows from personal experience that it doesn't mean the misery is gone, that it won't come back, there's much too much history there for it to have vanished entirely; it just means that he's capable of joy again--and that makes a difference, that makes all the difference in the world. 

Bucky sits up beside Steve, forearms resting on his drawn-up knees, and looks at him with an expression of such profound tenderness that Tony feels awkwardly guilty to have seen it. He tucks damp hair behind his ear and says something they can't hear through the glass, and whatever it is starts Steve off again, curling up with his arms wrapped round his ribs, pink with mirth.

"I think," says Natasha, "that they're gonna be okay."

"After considerable deliberation, I concur. Let's leave before they start actually making out."

~

Later, showered and dressed and with their various wounds once more tended to by a patient Dr. Banner, they sit together in their room, looking out over Manhattan. It is the same view Steve had been not-seeing when Sam Wilson came to talk to him, but it looks new, somehow: it looks as if each gleaming window and spire, each architectural flourish, has been taken apart and put back together cleaner and more beautifully than before. His fingers are laced with Bucky's metal ones, that cool slightly-rough touch getting more familiar, less noticeable. 

"It's not over," Bucky says, quietly. "Hydra's far from dead, and I'm not convinced they won't make another attempt to come secure their ex-asset if the circumstances allow. And the government hasn't decided what to do with me."

Steve bumps his shoulder very lightly against Bucky's. "I know. It's never gonna really be over, but maybe it can be a new kind of bad instead of the old one. But no matter what, Buck, I'm not leaving you again. If they do decide to put you on trial I'll do everything I can to get you exonerated--anything, I mean it, absolutely anything--and if...if you gotta go underground again, if you have to disappear, I'm coming with you."

Bucky looks sharply at him. "No you're not."

"Yeah. I am. I can't...do this, be this, without you. Not very well, anyway, and not for long. If we have to, we can go off the grid, drop out of sight, find some other way to live. I don't care if we end up being hobos, for God's sake, I _don't care_ what we have to do. Small price to pay for being with you."

Bucky is still looking at him, blue-grey eyes intent, his pupils wide. Steve can see himself reflected in them, two tiny ghost-Steves in the darkness inside Bucky's head. "You mean it. You really mean that, don't you," Bucky says. "That you'd give up everything, all this--" he waves a hand vaguely at the window--"stop being Captain America, for me."

"I dunno how much more clearly I can phrase it," Steve says. "Maybe in words of one syllable: _Yes_. I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I don't want to be where you aren't. Okay? If you have to leave, I'm coming with. Somebody else can be Captain America, if they need the symbol to go on, but it doesn't have to be me. Buck, I lost you, I lost you over and over again, part of me kind of...broke, every time...and I can't go through that anymore. There's not enough left to hold together."

He's squeezing Bucky's fingers hard enough that it would hurt if his left hand had been original equipment, and in fact Bucky does wince a little; Steve may never stop being amazed at what Stark has been able to achieve with his new hardware. "Sorry," he says, and eases up. "But I mean it. I have never meant anything more than I mean this, right now: wherever you go, I'm going with you. As long as you want me there."

Bucky swallows hard. "Oh," he says, after too long. 

"Oh?" Steve repeats, feeling that familiar cold sick feeling begin in his chest. "Oh what?"

"Oh, _good_ ," Bucky says, and kisses him so hard his ears ring. 

~

Two weeks pass, and the worst of the craziness on the news and online has begun to die down, giving way to the ranks of conspiracy theorists, whom Tony thinks they can pretty much ignore. Bucky's wounds heal to silvery scars, fading into the network of scars already covering much of his body. The new Grand Central terminal building is re-opened with a repaired facade and less by way of ceremony, and nobody gets shot even a little. Steve is aware that Bucky's spending a lot of time talking on the phone, and assumes it's Sam he's calling, and respects his privacy despite how curious he is. Steve talks to Sam himself, regularly, as he'd promised. Sometimes it really does feel like it helps. 

They get on with the business of healing. 

~

It had been Bucky's idea to go down to see Peggy, but Steve had agreed at once; he'd been meaning to visit her in the weeks before everything got complicated, but grey inertia had weighed him down, obscured intentions and effort. He'd been a little surprised when Bucky suggested they take a trip down to DC. _Your memories of that place must be about a thousand times worse than mine._

_Gotta face it sometime,_ Bucky had said, with a shrug. Both shoulders moved smoothly now, naturally, so far removed from the heavy unbalanced awkwardness of the past. _Might as well be now. And she's got to be worried about you._ He hadn't said _she may not have much time left_ ; he hadn't needed to.

It's a four-hour trip from New York to DC, more if you're obeying the speed limits on the turnpike and 95, and Steve doesn't speed in borrowed cars. Much. Cruising south in one of Tony's interchangeable Audis, he looks over at Bucky, slumped comfortably in the seat, and remembers telling Nat to take her feet off the dashboard. That whole conversation had seemed surreal in the light of what followed afterward: _nobody special, though?_

_Believe it or not_ , he'd said, _it's kind of hard to find someone with shared life experience._

"What?" Bucky says, looking at him, and he hastily redirects his attention to the road. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he says, and it's almost true. 

~

Parking has not become any less of a gigantic pain in the ass in the time since Steve had left Washington. Back then he'd just had the bike to worry about, it took up far less space than Tony's stupidly expensive status symbol, and it takes him a little while to find a spot in walking distance to the private nursing home where Peggy is spending her time these days. Just the thought of so much time, the weight of so many years balanced on her shoulders, is enough to send a little shiver through him as he gets out of the car. 

"You _sure_ you're okay?" Bucky says. He's moved with that spooky quick grace of his, coming around to take Steve's arm. "You're really pale, Stevie, maybe this isn't a good idea..."

_Stevie_. The diminutive feels like a warm blanket to his brain, instantly calling up memories of being taken care of, being wrapped up against chills, leaning against a much larger shoulder. "I'm okay. I can do this."

Bucky looks searchingly into his face for a moment longer, and then just nods. Both of them are in nondescript mufti, jeans and hoodies, wearing baseball caps, and at least one of them is very good at not being noticed when he does not want to be. Neither attracts much attention on the brief walk to the nursing home. It's in Georgetown, an old Federal mansion repurposed into an expensive and luxurious place in which to get slowly older. 

They had called ahead, of course, and Steve had been there before, so the receptionist doesn't freak out when Captain America and somebody looking a whole lot like the Winter Soldier approach the desk. She does, however, look extremely wide-eyed and more than a little terrified as she directs them up to Peggy's rooms on the second floor. 

Bucky sighs, once they're out of earshot. "It's gonna take a long time to get used to that look."

"What, the starstruck one?"

"No, the one where they're obviously thinking 'oh god oh god it's that russian guy he's gonna kill me'," Bucky says drily. His Brooklyn accent hasn't resurfaced completely, but it comes out from time to time, like now. "I mean, I'm used to seeing it, but not to _minding_ it."

Steve takes his hand, squeezes it tight. "We'll give them something better to think about." 

Peggy's door is nondescript dark wood with the number in gold. Steve knocks, remembering the last time he'd been here, before everything happened, and lets them in. 

She's...not in bed. She's up, and dressed, sitting in an upright armchair in the little parlor adjoining her bedroom. Her hair is like spun glass, white clouds around her face; as before he is struck by how appallingly tiny she seems, wizened and dappled with age-spots, but her eyes are bright and appraising and intelligent in their nests of wrinkles. 

That bright gaze moves from Steve to Bucky, and incredibly, Peggy smiles. "I see what you mean," she tells Bucky. "He _is_ too thin."

"Huh?" Steve is so confused. Beside him Bucky is smiling too, and then he's crossed the room to her and...bent to kiss her cheek?

"It's nice to finally see you again, Sergeant, after all these years," Peggy says. "I'm glad you brought him. Come here, Steve?"

"Peggy," he says, still lost, and goes over to her chair, takes the hand she offers. "What's going on?"

"Your young man and I have...been discussing a number of things." She has to take two breaths to the sentence, but she looks more present, more with-it than he's yet seen her this side of the ice. "He seems to think you've been remiss...in keeping a date."

Steve looks from her to Bucky, realizing what all those mysterious phone conversations must have been about, and is amazed at the expression on his face: a kind of sad, sweet fondness that makes his throat close for a moment. "What--"

"Captain America is supposed to be an officer and a gentleman," Bucky says, "and it ain't polite to keep a lady waiting for nearly seventy years, but I figure, hey, better late than never."

Peggy's eyes are so bright, brilliant. She holds out her other hand; moving in a daze, Steve takes it in his, runs his thumb over the misshapen lumps of her knuckles. "Captain Rogers," she says, "may I have this dance?"

He can't speak at all. The room doubles, triples, through a prism of tears; he can barely see Bucky taking her lap-robe away and helping her out of the chair. It dimly registers that she is wearing red. Then with surprising strength Peggy is pulling his arm around her waist, taking his other hand. He looks down into her face, and all he can see is _his_ Peggy, laughing and vivid and so alive, all dark eyes and crimson lips curved in a smile. 

Somewhere music starts up, and that's right, too, that's from the right time: one of those slow songs they'd play in between the energetic dance tunes, in the bars, in the war. Bing Crosby sang it, but the version they played in London was Al Bowlly's. He thinks it was called _Little Lady Make-Believe._

Nobody's singing now, just a piano gently spilling out notes into the air.

Steve holds Peggy in his arms, looking through a window to the past glazed with seventy years of ice; and slowly, slowly, just a turning shuffle, they begin to dance. 

He doesn't know how long it goes on--the time seems slow and sweet, like it sometimes does in dreams--but eventually the music stops. Bit by bit Steve becomes aware of the world around him again, aware that Peggy's weight in his arms is so fragile, so frail, and that she is breathing hard; and then the rest of it comes back in a rush. He's standing in the middle of Peggy Carter's sitting-room, with tears on his face; she is leaning against him, her face against his chest, and looking down at her he can see little heartbreaking glimpses of pink scalp through her colorless glass-fine hair. 

Steve bends to brush the crown of her head with his lips. She looks up at him, her own tears bright. "Oh no you don't," she says in that cracked quavering voice that still has echoes he remembers. "I want a _proper_ kiss, Steve Rogers."

So he kisses her, for the second time in his life, and probably the last. She's smiling when he straightens up. 

"That's better," Peggy says. "And now I'm tired, and I'd like to lie down. Thank you, Sergeant Barnes, that was very nice playing."

He blinks, and realizes Bucky's been sitting at the little upright piano that takes up half of the far wall. Gently Bucky closes the cover over the keyboard. "My pleasure, ma'am." 

Peggy droops in his arms, and Steve looks around for the call button, then just lifts her as gently as he can and carries her to her bed. The little color she'd gained from the exertion is draining from her face, and he can tell she's in pain and he could kick himself for doing something so stupid as to actually try to _dance_ with her, where the hell is the call button for the nurse, oh, God--

Her hand closes over his, again with that surprising strength, and her eyes drift open. "Don't you dare...regret a moment of that," she says. Behind him the door opens, and people are talking. "Don't you dare."

Bucky is there, and she looks from Steve to him, and smiles again. The effort is visible, but it doesn't mean the smile isn't absolutely beautiful. "Take care of him," she says. "Promise me."

Bucky swallows, and nods, and finds enough voice to say "Yes, ma'am, I will."

The nurses are trying to get them to leave the room, but Steve seems to be transfixed, holding her hand. Her fingers give his a quick squeeze, and let go. "Steve. Sometimes the...the best thing to do..."

"Is start over," he finishes for her. 

She nods. "Make something...new."

"I'll try," he says, and now the nurses really are beginning to get insistent about it, and she pats his hand. 

"Thank you. Thank you for...not standing me up, Captain."

"Peggy--"

"Go on. I'll be all right."

It's patently false, but the look in her eyes is as clear as it ever had been when she was young: _that's an order._ Steve gets up, and then Bucky has an arm around him, and the people in pink scrubs cluster around the bed and eclipse his view. "C'mon," Bucky is saying, "we have to go, Stevie, c'mon, come with me, let them do their jobs."

He leans on Bucky, the way he always has done, and lets himself be led away.

~

"Was it a terrible idea?" Bucky asks, an hour later, somewhere on 95 north. He's driving, no license, no fucks given. Steve hasn't spoken since he got into the car, sitting like a statue, looking down at his hands. "Was it, like...the worst thing I could have done? I gotta know, Steve. Christ, I'm sorry." He feels almost as sick as he had in the waiting room at the hospital. 

"Huh?" Steve says, as if from a very long way away. 

"How bad did I just fuck up?"

He's holding something. Bucky can't make out what it is, cupped in the shelter of his fingers: looks like a round metal case of some kind. "You...you didn't fuck up," Steve says, still very distant. "At all."

"I just...I know you guys were something special, back in the day. And that you'd been to see her, but not...not recently, with all the tiresome shit about finding me and getting my head screwed back on the right way, and so I asked Wilson to find out where she was and..."

He sounds like an idiot. Bucky has to make himself relax his left hand so as not to splinter Stark's steering wheel. "I called her and she remembered me. I wasn't expecting that. She asked about you, how you were doing--I guess she saw that whole Hydra thing on the news--and we just talked a lot. About you, mostly."

Steve is turning the round thing over and over in his fingers, not looking at it so much as through it. 

"She told me about you in Basic, just so fucking determined and so _brave_ , you never ever gave up no matter how much shit the other guys gave you. About you jumping on that dummy grenade while literally every other person ran for their lives. About you going through the serum thing, how much guts that took, how you were screaming but you told them not to stop, that you could do this. I told her how you and I met, when that asshole kid was beating you up and you had an asthma attack that scared the hell out of me and all you said when you could finally breathe again was 'I had him on the ropes'." 

Like he had when he'd told Pepper, Bucky had demanded _what the hell do you do with someone like that,_ and Peggy had given the same answer, only out loud. _Love him_. Bucky had laughed a little startled laugh. _Yeah, I guess that's the only thing you_ can _do._

He doesn't know how to tell Steve about those conversations, what they meant to him, how it was like finally filling in the last missing pieces of something that had been broken and jumbled long ago, finally understanding the shape of the whole. Talking to Peggy had felt in some weird way kind of like absolution. 

"Anyway, she told me the whole thing with you not knowing how to dance--which is bullshit, you could kind of like...flail along with the music on a good night, I remember that--and her promising to teach you, and then you having to go save the goddamn world and get stuck in the goddamn ice for seventy goddamn years like the little punk you are, and I just kind of thought _what if you could have that dance after all_ , and she liked the idea, and..." 

Bucky realizes he's doing ninety in a sixty-five and forces himself to slow down, calm down, deep breaths, focus on one thing at a time. Focus on operating a motor vehicle. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In, out. Slowly he gets back the wandering edges of control. When he's feeling better he looks back over at Steve, who hasn't said a word, and sees with a stab of guilt but absolutely no surprise that he's crying. 

"I'm sorry," he says, inadequately. "I'm...really sorry."

Steve turns his tearstained face to him. "Pull over."

Oh, shit. He signals, changes lanes. "Are you gonna throw up?"

"Pull over," Steve says again, closing his eyes, and he really doesn't look that great and Bucky doesn't want to be the one to hand Stark's Audi back to its owner with barf stains on the upholstery, so he gets them over to the shoulder in a hurry. 

As soon as they stop, though, instead of scrambling out and being sick by the side of the road, Steve just runs a hand through his hair, takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes. He looks at Bucky with an intensity that's been missing for a long time now. It's the same intensity Bucky remembers from every time they argued about him trying to join up, back before it all, the same fierce determination.

"Look," he says, uncurling his fingers to display what's in his hand: a battered compass in a case. Inside the lid is a photograph faded and blotched by age, carefully cut out of a bigger group shot to fit perfectly into the round space. Peggy Carter, young and strong and beautiful, her dark hair curled and rolled in the style of another era, her lips curved in a smile, looks out at Bucky. 

"When I was...on the way down, on the _Valkyrie_ , I put this on the console where I could see it, could have her face be the last good thing I saw. They must've found it when they found me. Having it back, a little piece of my old life in the middle of this new one, was...kind of like an anchor, I guess. But it always reminded me of how much I'd lost, how much I never got to see. I knew, absolutely knew, that I'd never be able to keep my promise, that I left her hanging."

Bucky isn't sure where he's going with this. "But you--"

"Shut up," Steve says, not unkindly. "What you just did was _fix that_. I'd never in a million years have thought of it myself--even if she wasn't so frail and sick, she married someone else, she had kids, one missed date with a dumb kid in a spangly suit a whole lifetime ago wasn't exactly going to leave her bereft--but with your characteristic subtlety you just kind of went ahead and _asked_ her and then arranged the whole damn thing. Sure, I sort of joked about it with her, before Insight happened, but I never would have dreamed of actually asking her to dance. I'm not surprised that you two traded stories. The Steve Rogers Survivors Club."

"Appreciation Society," Bucky corrects, blinking.

"Whatever. The point is, I owe you. I...never thought I could have that dance with my best girl. How are you so _good_?"

"I'm not, I just...what? Wait. You're not upset?"

"Of course I'm upset," Steve says, rolling his eyes. "How could I not be? But that's not...that's...oh, the hell with it." He leans across the car, grabs Bucky by the sweatshirt, and pulls him into a violent, nose-bumping, awkward, absolutely wonderful kiss. 

~

A few days later, a package arrives at the tower for Bucky, addressed by hand. 

It's a copy of Steve's Project Rebirth file, perhaps the most comprehensive and complete version of it that exists. It contains pictures and notes, assessments and descriptions, that appear nowhere else. It tells the story of his journey from 4F draft-reject to Captain America better than any narration in any museum display ever could, and it shows aspects of the training process that didn't make it into the history books. It is as close as Peggy Carter can come to making a gift out of the time Bucky missed between the night of the Expo and the night Steve rescued him from Zola. 

There's a simple note: _I've kept this for long enough. Now it belongs with you. Give him my love (and keep some for yourself). Peggy._

~

In the end, everything comes down to the second law. It takes more effort to stay cold than it does to warm up, when a choice is given; and while nothing can ever be perfect, given entropy, sometimes good is good enough. 

Steve holds his battered compass in his hand and thinks of the closing lines of a book he had read sometime between waking from the ice and falling from the Helicarrier: _We are here. We will work together for what purpose seems to us right. We will work with calm, and with tolerance and, please God, with saving laughter._

_We know something of men. We know of evil, and of sloth, and of self-seeking ambition. We accept it, and will use what we have of wit and good faith to overcome it._

_And if we do not overcome it still we are the road; we are the bridge; we are the conduit. For something have we been born. For something have we been brought here. And if we hold firm, the men who peopled our earth need not be ashamed, when the reckoning comes, to say_ we worked with all we had been given; and for one another.

_We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, that's it. Thanks to everyone who's come along with me on this particular ride, everyone who's read and commented and encouraged me to continue. I didn't know where it was going when I began, but six months and sixty-odd thousand words later I think I know what happens next. There will be at least one sequel to _Waiting for the Winter_ , but in the meantime I leave you with an invitation to come visit me on [tumblr](http://ceruleancynic.tumblr.com/), and with the official Stark-approved poster for this whole mess.
> 
>  
> 
> WFTW is dedicated to [specialshera](http://specialshera.tumblr.com/), for inspiration and support, and to [rainbowbarnacle](http://rainbowbarnacle.tumblr.com/), for consistently awesome beta reading and also support.
> 
> Quotes opening the chapters of this story are from songs by Tony Carey, mostly from the Planet P Project _Go Out Dancing_ albums and _Pink World_. Most of them are available on Youtube. Here are the ones that appear most frequently:
> 
>  
> 
> [Waiting for the Winter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7-bs2OFa_c)  
> [The Stranger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxkh88iMkXM)  
> [The New Frontier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fegA2qU04ac)  
> [One Star Falling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITsZjsil9t8)  
> [Saw a Satellite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTuErijsOuQ)  
> [Good Little Soldiers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsIdhM3dG0)  
> [The Red Door](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exckf1wNNvg)  
> [Where We Want You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGloMOvT49A)


	19. epilogue (post-credits scene)

A few days later still, while the question of what to do with Sgt. James B. Barnes, ex-Soviet operative and war criminal, continues to be argued:

Pepper is making her post-workout smoothie in the kitchen, its windows partially dimmed to block out some of the brilliant sunlight of a summer day, when the sky abruptly darkens. Clouds pour into the blueness like ink into water, and a flicker of lightning appears--and stays, and glows like a shaft of sizzling solid light for several moments before resolving itself into something silver and red. 

She is just reaching the penthouse lounge when Thor strides in, Mjolnir hooked to his belt. He beams at her. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is capable of beaming like Thor; Pepper feels the power of that smile like sunshine. "My lady," he says, and bows. "I come with glad tidings. The ordering and stabilization of the realms is again complete. Once more, balance is achieved."

"Good," says Pepper. "The, uh. The realms, all balanced. That's great news, Thor. Welcome back."

"And what of Midgard?" he asks. "I would not have left you without my protection had there been a choice. How fares the world? Have any matters of import arisen?"

Pepper opens her mouth to say something, thinks, thinks again, and closes it for a moment, holding up a finger. "That's...you know what, that's a, uh, a long story. Um. Come down to the kitchen with me and I'll try to give you the Cliffs Notes version."

"Lead on," Thor says, gesturing expansively. "I would hear these notes of the cliffs." For the first time Pepper notices that he's holding something in one enormous hand, and a kind of wonder comes over her. She stares. 

"What?" he asks, and then follows her gaze. "Ah...yes, I came straight here with but one interruption. For all their wonder and magical advancement, none among the realms can match Midgard for the richness and magnificence of their lattes of the spiced pumpkin."

He has no idea why Pepper starts laughing, but it's infectious, and when she comes up to him and hugs as much of him as she can wrap her arms around, still helpless with mirth, Thor is chuckling himself. It is good to be back, he thinks. It is _very_ good to be back.


End file.
